


So If There’s Any Other Way To Spell The Word That’s Fine With Me

by luninosity



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bakery, Baked Goods, Basically The McFassy Version Of Sabrina, Drunken Shenanigans, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Mention Of Various Family And Friends, Miscommunication, Rain, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Fassbender whiskey distilleries are justifiably famous (and quite intoxicating on certain occasions), James is Michael’s housekeeper’s grandson (and a possibly-magical cupcake-creating genius), many misunderstandings occur (and are eventually resolved), and two people fall in love.</p><p>Or, the story which properly begins here: <i>“James…if you could do anything…what would you do?”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue: know your butler, unlike other guys…

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter headings from Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma;” everything else, very loosely based, with affection, on the film _Sabrina_. Thanks to all the people over on LJ who read bits and encouraged! *appreciates*

It’s a party. The whole world twinkles with light.  
  
The lights swing goldenly between trees, strung on nearly invisible strands; the pool’s full of floating candles, and the birthday cake towers magisterially over the smaller denizens of the dessert table, off to the right. Enchanted. Magical.  
  
Michael sighs, tells himself to stop looking out the window, and stares balefully at the paperwork littering his office desk. It stares back, limpidly.  
  
“It’s my sister’s birthday,” he tells it. “This isn’t fair.” You’re the one who wanted to run the family business, the ink-lines point out silently in return.   
  
And it’s a lucrative business. Everyone likes premium whiskey, after all. The Fassbender distilleries are justifiably famous. And Michael, somewhat to his own surprise, likes the numbers, the accounting, the corporate bottom lines. They’re clear. Sensible. He’s good at sensible.  
  
He’s contemplating projections regarding next quarter’s sales when a billow of laughter leaps up through the night and draws him, annoyed and tempted, over to the window again, pen still in hand.  
  
James. Of course.  
  
Their housekeeper’s grandson, all mischievous chocolate hair and eyes that Michael can’t see from that distance but knows to be seawater blue, stands there in the midst of a knot of old family acquaintances, a full head shorter than most of his wealthy audience, and makes one more complicated hand gesture, demonstrating some point with every inch of compact energy, and they all smile and look at him as if they’re considering sweeping him off his feet right there, enthralled by every damn Scottish-accented word.  
  
James always has known how to charm the world. He can talk to anyone, from jaded investment bankers to Michael’s own sister, giving them all complete and sincere enthusiastic attention. And everyone leaves the conversation feeling special, as if, for just a moment, they’ve been really heard.  
  
Michael, watching James shake hair out of his eyes and earnestly nod at one of Michael’s real-estate solicitors, feels the familiar tangle of admiration, jealousy, and sympathy for the spellbound audience. James isn’t leaving the Fassbender family. Not for anything.  
  
He fiddles with his pen, rolling it over fingers and back one-handedly.  
  
Catherine wanders over to James’s circle of admirers, and says something that gets James to turn around and practically lift her off her feet in a hug. Michael grins. And then stops grinning, as his sister swats James on the shoulder, mock-reproach for the familiarity, and James smiles, slow and wicked, and picks up her hand and kisses it.   
  
Wait, Michael almost says aloud. No. That’s not an appropriate greeting. Not on Catherine’s birthday, not from a person who’s practically grown up with them, not from their housekeeper’s grandson, not from James, because— Well. _Because_.  
  
The elderly gentleman on James’s left makes an observation that prompts a laugh. James turns back to him, also laughing, and Michael wonders if it’s his imagination or if he really can see that playfulness in blue eyes, and then James copies the gesture precisely, lips brushing the back of the man’s hand, even ending with the same teasing look. The guests chortle.  
  
Michael flips the pen so hard it flies out of his hand.  
  
Catherine puts a hand on James’s shoulder, and he smiles up at her, and he blends in so well, so perfectly at ease even in a borrowed coat and battered not-quite-dress-shoes, and suddenly Michael can picture them alone together, under the fairy-light illumination of the trees and the moon, slipping off into the dark…  
  
He owns a dinner jacket. Somewhere.   
  
By the time he gets down the stairs and out to the party, James has gotten everyone to laugh again, even the two managers of rival branch distilleries who haven’t been in the same room since the previous decade. Michael, turning up out of breath and in a coat that he discovered on the way downstairs is two sizes too large, stands there panting while they maneuver around to make space for him.  
  
“Michael!” Those brilliant eyes light up even more, as if his belated appearance was the only thing that could possibly’ve made James’s night better. “So you did come out to join us, then.”  
  
“Yes,” Catherine says pointedly, “you claimed you had work to do. On my birthday.”  
  
“Oh, don’t make him feel more guilty. He made it, didn’t he?” And the eyes sparkle in Michael’s direction, as if James’d never had any doubt.  
  
Suddenly he feels like he’s suffocating, despite the voluminous jacket. “I…happy birthday. What are we talking about?”  
  
“Cocoa, in fact,” observes one of the bankers. “Chocolate notes. Young Mr McAvoy knows rather a lot about good South American sources, you know, why haven’t we heard from him before?”  
  
Mr McAvoy?  
  
“Stop that,” James says. “I told you to call me James.”  
  
Which isn’t better. Not in any way.  
  
“James,” Michael says, helplessly undermining his own objections, “what are you telling people?”  
  
“They asked.” James grins. “About dessert. About the pastries, earlier. Evidently I nearly made Kevin—sorry, Doctor Bacon—have an orgasm in your rose garden.”  
  
Michael chokes on nothing at all. “James—you—you can’t just say—you _what_ —”  
  
“Oh,” James says, now grinning even more mischievously, “I meant with the chocolate mousse, honestly, Michael, I’ve no idea what you were thinking,” and the good doctor, apparently in the mood to make things worse, chimes in, “No, he’s right, haven’t enjoyed anything so much in the last ten years,” and Michael desperately stifles the whimper before it can escape out loud.  
  
“I still can’t believe you created all those pastries yourself,” coos a woman Michael doesn’t recognize, someone or other’s wife. “You must be in such demand…as a chef, of course.”  
  
James blushes, because evidently flirting with every human being in existence is no problem but compliments directed at him personally are, and says, “No, I’m not—I’ve not had any formal training. And this one I did as a favor.”  
  
Catherine smiles at him for that.  
  
Michael says, “Of course we’ve always let James use our kitchen,” and then wonders, horrified, what awful person’s taken possession of his mouth.  
  
Many surprised pairs of eyes swivel his direction; James, obviously startled, blinks, breathes in, reacquires balance. “And I’ve been grateful. You know I am; I couldn’t’ve come up with any of this without you.” Completely truthful. Utterly sincere. The ocean-blue gaze shines with honesty.  
  
“So you grew up here?” That persistent woman again, her three-martini stare fixed on James. “You’re a friend of the family?”  
  
“James is our housekeeper’s grandson,” Michael snaps. It’s not him talking. Can’t be. Someone else, some automaton with no regard for emotions, no recognition of the shocked paleness of James’s face.  
  
“James,” Catherine says, glaring viciously in Michael’s direction, “you were talking about salt. Earlier.”  
  
“I…right, yes. There’s…sea salt…in the ones with the caramel.” James isn’t looking at Michael, now.  
  
“Salt? Really?”  
  
“It…the flavor of it highlights the sweetness. Makes it more complex.” James _is_ , at this point, looking at Catherine, even while everyone else looks at him. It’s a look that’d not be out of place on a drowning sailor spotting a lifeboat in the distance.  
  
Michael bites his lip so hard he tastes blood. The circle of bodies seems to’ve drifted slightly away from him and closed ranks, so that he’s no longer a part of the conversation.  
  
James keeps talking, in that woodsmoke-and-bagpipes voice, about bitterness and sweetness, how the molten silkiness of chocolate can be enriched and complicated by salt and heat and spice. The dancing overheard lights, the glitter of the party, weave shining streaks through his hair. His eyes never return to Michael.  
  
Who stumbles back inside. Finds his office, then his desk. Sits down, mostly out of habit, on his imposing executive chair.  
  
He doesn’t know _what_ this feeling is. He’s never confronted it before. And he’s known James for years. Ever since James’s parents fell apart for murky and vague but implicitly unpleasant reasons, the day a tiny boy with enormous blue eyes and his sister’s hand firmly grasped in his had turned up fearlessly at the front door and asked to see his grandmother.  
  
Technically there’d been an adult with them, some sort of case worker. James had done most of the talking anyway. Determinedly.  
  
The next morning, hours after they’d all agreed that James and Joy could stay, after Michael and Catherine had stayed up most of the night deciding that they should probably be kind to the newcomers, Michael’d come downstairs to find James in the kitchen making toast, even though he was small enough to need to sit on the counter to reach.  
  
“Are you supposed to be here?” Michael’d blurted out, forgetting his previous night’s resolution.  
  
“Gran’s toaster doesn’t work.” James had carefully plucked the pieces out as they emerged. Beautifully golden-brown. “Sorry. I’ll leave.”  
  
“Oh,” Michael’d said, last lingering annoyance abruptly defused. “I…didn’t know. We can get you a new one.”  
  
“Not me. Her.” James had looked down, at the distance between himself and the floor, and then at his plate of toast. “Um.”  
  
“You can hand that to me…okay, and if you hang on I can help you get—”  
  
“… _ow_.”  
  
“…down. Are you—”  
  
“I’m fine.” James reclaimed the toast, somehow still dignified despite what had to be a throbbing bruise on one knee, and a hint of shining wetness in sapphire depths. “Thank you.”  
  
Michael’d glanced at the plate, uncomfortable when faced with that simple bravery. Noticed something. “These’re perfect. I mean. I always burn toast. Like…always.”  
  
“It’s not that hard,” James’d said, also resolutely focusing on the plate, “if you just ask them to turn out nicely.”  
  
“I don’t think that’d work for me.”  
  
“No,” James said, “no, it works for me, I always used to ask everything to turn out right because someone needed to make breakfast for Joy and I had to make everything right the first time because there wasn’t enough to do it over so I always had to make everything right—” And Michael’d put both arms around him and held him, the two of them sliding down to sit together on the sunlit kitchen floor.  
  
James always has been brilliant in the kitchen. James has been brilliant, period. A genius. And Michael’s best friend, the person who’d been standing beside him when Michael’d taken over his father’s company, the person who’d never doubted that Michael _could_. The person who laughs as if he’s beckoning the whole wide world to join in on the joke and laugh along, and who smiles in a way that warms up blue eyes from the inside.   
  
It’s the smile of someone who knows exactly how cruel life can be, and who chooses to be kind. Michael’s always admired that about him.  
  
And now everyone else admires him, too.  
  
Including Catherine. Including every one of those silver-haired men who’d looked at James like he was a rare and savory delicacy, delightful and intoxicating and likely purchasable for the right price.  
  
Michael catches himself grinding his teeth together. Forcibly, stops.  
  
The silly drunken woman’d called James a chef. James had laughed, and ducked his head, and said those words about having no training…  
  
Michael’s got a lot of money.  
  
He lunges for his computer. Starts feverish research.  
  
Two hours later, he finds himself back out at the party, abominable jacket purposely left behind. The cake’s been cut, carrot-and-cream-cheese decadence devoured down to the scraps; half the guests’re gone and the other half have taken too much advantage of the Fassbender private whiskey reserves to go _anywhere_ , and James and Catherine are sitting by the fountain, talking intently.  
  
Cat’s got one hand on James’s arm. That unnamed vertiginous feeling lurches through his stomach again.  
  
“Cat,” he says, and his voice scrapes thickly across his vocal chords, “I’d like to talk to James.”  
  
His sister crosses her arms. “About what?”  
  
“It’s all right,” James says, and gets up, as fearless as he’s ever been. “I’ll tell Joy you played her record tonight, that’ll make her happy…”  
  
“I miss your sister,” Cat says. “She needs to schedule shorter tours. Michael, what do you want?”  
  
Michael, who doesn’t have a good previously-prepared answer for that, looks at her beseechingly.  
  
“It’s probably too much to hope that you’re going to be sensible,” she says, “but at least don’t be an ass. If you can manage it. I’m off to pick a medical school.”  
  
“They’ll be lucky to have you even consider them,” James offers, and she walks away grinning from ear to ear.  
  
Michael looks at James, across the distance of his own unforgivable rudeness.  
  
“What did you want, then?” James trails a hand over the cool stone of the fountain’s lip. “I assume you’ve come out here with a reason?”  
  
A reason. He has a reason. James looks so otherworldly in the glow of the lights, cinnamon freckles and pale skin.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Are you asking, or answering?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“…never mind. James…if you could do anything…what would you do?” He’s never asked before. Asking now, he can blame it on the night. Ensorcelled. Reckless. Glorious. And he won’t have to wonder _why_ he’s never thought to ask.  
  
James laughs, somehow managing to be both amused and not amused at once. “Anything? I imagine I’d make the world be happy, wouldn’t I?”  
  
Of course he would. “No…I mean…seriously. For you. What would you want to do, if you could do anything you wanted? Right now.”  
  
“Right now?” James reaches up, touches a low-hanging branch. One burnt-out light-bulb miraculously shimmers back into brightness at the contact. “I’d be a world-famous pastry chef. Naturally.”  
  
Michael’s breath catches in his chest, for no apparent reason.  
  
“So,” he says, uneasily, “we—well, if you wanted—I mean, you are—it’s sort of—would you want to go to culinary school? If you had the money?”  
  
And James’s eyes go wide. And Michael realizes that he’s never seen, or known, any kind of true joy before. Not like this. Like sunlight bursting out over the oceans. Like the first-ever dawn.  
  
His own heart leaps in answer.  
  
And then in the next second it all goes away.  
  
“Why…” James takes a step back. Sits down on the edge of the fountain, not as if he wants to, but as if he can’t stand. His face is pale, beneath the freckles. “Oh. Earlier. Your guests—Catherine. You—you think I would—and you think I’m not—” He stops.   
  
Michael stands there in the silver-dusted detritus of the party, and stares at those astonishedly comprehending eyes, and can’t find any words at all.   
  
He shouldn’t feel this—this—whatever it is he’s feeling. This sense of dirtiness, anathema, as if he’s the villain in this narrative. As if this is an act of betrayal, rather than himself protecting everyone’s honor. He’s right. He knows he is.  
  
But when he looks at James’s face again, he feels cold.   
  
James shakes his head. Reaches one hand down. Grazes fingertips, lightly, over the barest surface of the water, which ruffles around the touch like it’s trying to offer comfort.  
  
Michael opens his mouth. He’s not sure what he’s going to say. But he has to say something. Someone has to say something. He can’t stand here feeling like he’s falling off the edge of a cliff forever, there has to be solid ground at some point, doesn’t there?  
  
Doesn’t there?  
  
“James—”  
  
“All right.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
James lifts his hand away from the water. Studies his damp fingertips, then looks up, at Michael’s face. He doesn’t _get_ up, and Michael’s sense of dislocation only gets worse, as if this is all some disastrous dream.  
  
“Yes. All right.” James does stand up, this time. He’s still shorter than Michael, but somehow that’s irrelevant here and now under the lights. “You made an offer. I’m saying yes.”  
  
“You…”  
  
“I expect to see all of this in writing. Tomorrow. Whatever funding I require. Tuition, room and board, probably something—not too much, I don’t need it—for unforeseen expenses. In exchange I’ll promise not to come back. Not to spend time with your sister, or your guests. You won’t ever have to see me here again.” So cool. Icier than the stars; the moon, not wanting to witness the scene, darts behind a passing cloud.  
  
“But,” Michael says, not certain why. This is James saying yes, James agreeing before Michael’s even had the chance to negotiate the terms. This is what he’d come back out to the party intending to accomplish.  
  
But it isn’t right.   
  
What it is, is _wrong_.   
  
Those blue eyes had just been so purely happy. They’re very flat, now. Unreadable.  
  
No. That’s not entirely true. He can read the newborn cynicism because it’s right there on the surface, unflinching and bitter.  
  
James has never been cynical. Never, in all the years Michael’s known him.   
  
“Second thoughts?” James raises both eyebrows. “No. Not you. You’d not make an offer unless you’re prepared to follow through. You always have a plan.”  
  
The tone, oddly enough, isn’t angry. Only weary, and, when James adds, “And now I do too,” flavored with self-deprecation.  
  
Michael stands there bereft of words.  
  
“Good night, Mr Fassbender,” James says, and walks away. The moonlight pops out from behind the cloud and follows him, taking along all the light in the world.  
  
Michael stays put for a very long time, alone with the night and the fountain and the memory of extinguished joy over blue ocean waves.  
  
  
James comes by his office in the morning. James dressed in blue and grey and black, a leather jacket that’s just slightly too large for him, his hair catching on the collar. James smiling at Michael’s secretary, handing her a small paper bag, hands shaping expressive movements out of the air.  
  
Michael’s on the phone. It’s important. Business concerns in Russia. They drink a lot of alcohol in Russia.  
  
He loses the thread of the conversation, watching James laugh.  
  
His secretary glances at him, purses her lips, then says something to James, gets up, comes into Michael’s office, plucks the contract neatly off his desk, whisks back out, and hands it over before Michael can say _wait_ or _stop_ or _I want to talk to him myself, please, I want to apologize or offer something else or take it all back, something, anything, to get him to laugh again but in a way that reaches those eyes…_  
  
The person on the phone starts yelling at him in Russian. Michael hastily apologizes, makes arrangements for extra shipments, and scribbles notes for later, and looks up just in time to see his secretary hand James back his copy of the signed agreement. James nods, suffers himself to be hugged, and slips out the door and is gone.  
  
Michael ends the call, with fingers that don’t feel like his. Sets the phone down mechanically. Wanders into the other room.  
  
“Here,” she chirps at him, “all signed and tidy, I knew you were busy and he was in a hurry to be gone, so we didn’t want to bother you, that’s what he said, he’s such a nice boy, he even brought over cookies for me and he remembered I like oatmeal raisin with extra raisins, do you want one, are you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine,” Michael says, each word hollow and precise, and then walks back into his office and shuts the door.  
  
He throws the signed agreement into a drawer. Doesn’t look at it again.  
  
Doesn’t look at it again until the following year, a year and four months and two days, in fact, the day that he realizes that he has more money in that account that he ought to have. The day on which it becomes apparent that James hasn’t touched the credit card, or the account at all, since the end of his first year of culinary school, a country and an ocean-channel away, in France. Even though tuition for _this_ year is long since due. Even though James must be needing someplace to live, some money to live on.  
  
Michael stares at the figures on the screen. They gaze back, all innocent electronic accusation.  
  
There must be some explanation. Some logical, rational reason for James not to be using the funds set aside for him. Some detail that’ll make this all make sense.  
  
James wouldn’t’ve left school. Michael knows that the same way he recalls that first moment of ecstatic unguarded happiness, truth seared into his heart. James would never give up on that dream.  
  
The wording of the agreement proclaims, in pitiless black and white, _financial support for as long as required or until the completion of the terms of education_. As long as required; and Michael buries his face in his hands for a second, mind whirling.  
  
James hasn’t come home. And there are no other bills or withdrawals, either, nothing to indicate any need for him to take a semester or a year off and use the account for a different purpose instead. So James is either earning money some other way, and Michael determinedly does not think about all the other ways in which a beautiful blue-eyed young man might earn _that_ much money, or James is…  
  
No. He’d know. He’d _know_. James isn’t gone. James is a constant in his life, because not a day goes by without Michael thinking vaguely of him, wondering in the moments between sleep and waking where he might be, how he’s doing, who he’s become, so far from home.  
  
He’d be aware if something’d happened. There would’ve been news. Articles. The internet. James’s grandmother, who, he recalls with a pang of guilt, he’s not actually seen for the six months since her retirement, would have called him.  
  
Except she wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be any of his business, because he’s not family. No one has any reason to think that he’d care if something happened to James, other than perhaps to make a finance-related note of events.  
  
If something happened he’d _never_ know. Except for whenever he finally, belatedly, thought to check the accounts and found the discrepancy and only ever discovered that James was gone from his life, someplace unreachable and irrevocable, because of the stupid fucking money.  
  
Oh god.  
  
He actually runs out of the office, past his brand-new secretary—the previous one’d quit, citing his impossible disposition as her reason, and Michael’d given her glowing references _despite_ the fact that she kept persistently receiving small packages of baked goods postmarked from Paris—and jumps onto his motorbike and has no memory of the time between flying through his door and collapsing onto the sofa in the cozy little cottage home, out of breath and heart slamming against his ribs.  
  
James’s grandmother gives him a skeptical look. She’s even better at it than her grandson. “So you decided to leave work mid-day to come visit an old woman? Must be urgent.”  
  
“You’re not old,” Michael protests automatically. Technically she probably is, but he’s under no illusions about who could take whom in a fight, verbal or otherwise. “And…sorry, I didn’t mean to…barge in on you…I was just…”  
  
“Breathe before you pass out on my couch.” She hands over tea. Michael nods, gratefully. And then has to set it down because his hands’re trembling.  
  
“You—have you heard from—” No. If James is hurt or sick—he can’t think that third possibility—she won’t appreciate the direct question.   
  
“I was—I was looking at some accounts, and I—I realized—you, um. You haven’t—James hasn’t—” Oh, fuck. And she’s still waiting for him to make any kind of sense.  
  
“James hasn’t used the account.” He’s giving up, now. “Is he—he’s all right, isn’t he? He’s still…”  
  
“Still what?” She’s not going to make this easy for him. Michael shuts his eyes.   
  
And then she says, amused and proud, “Still in school? Of course he is. Been winning awards.” Michael opens his eyes in time to see her wave at the wall, on which a corkboard gleefully displays newspaper clippings, black and white and yellowing with wear: photos of James performing demonstrations, holding a cupcake, looking faintly embarrassed, accepting a plaque, shaking hands with obviously important people, glancing away from the direct gaze of the camera lens.  
  
Some of the clippings are old. Some are quite recent. Last week, in fact.  
  
“He’s got a scholarship,” James’s grandmother says triumphantly. “That school knows he’s something special.” And then she blinks at Michael. “Oh. That’s why you came by, of course. We probably should’ve told you. He won’t be needing your money. So you can have it back. Sorry for the inconvenience.”  
  
She doesn’t sound sorry. That’s all right.  
  
Michael stares down into the murky herbal depths of his teacup. There are too many thoughts, too many emotions to process right now. But the one that’s rising to the surface is simple: James is fine. James is safe, and happy, and fine.  
  
And will never need Michael, not ever again.  
  
“Thank you,” he manages, at last, to the tea.  
  
Calm eyes consider him in silence for a moment, head tipped to one side. The same motion her grandson uses, thinking, deciding, making up his mind.  
  
Then she gets up. There’s a clank of bottles. And Michael finds himself holding a tumbler of scotch, liquid gold, instead of the tea.  
  
She nods to him, just once. Michael raises his glass to her, and she lifts hers right back, and they take a sip together, in perfect synchronicity.  
  
She pats him on the shoulder when he leaves.  
  
He sets every piece of electronic equipment he owns to alert him when James’s name pops up on the news, on cooking shows, in reviews. He watches all the competitions, and growls under his breath the time that James comes in second because the judges _clearly_ have some sort of bias toward the pretty blonde winner and her coconut monstrosity, and then cheers out loud in his office when James accepts the decision with a smile and a laugh and an offer to have a coconut–themed rematch sometime.  
  
James wins the next time. Of course he does.  
  
Michael finds himself dropping by to visit James’s grandmother on occasion, and then once a week, and then they end up cheering at all the televised competitions together. She reads him bits of letters and emails, and shares the pictures that James sends to her.  
  
James never sends Michael a letter or an email or a picture of himself with icing on his cheek and a ear-to-ear grin. James never tries, as far as Michael can tell, to contact him at all.


	2. I’ve seen those English dramas too, they’re cruel…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they meet again, three years later.

Three years later, three years without James, and Michael’s having a hell of a day, multiple hells in fact, export deals falling through and an acquisition hung up in legal messiness, and he stumbles wearily home and through the side door just _after_ the clouds open up overhead. All he wants is a decent drink and a blanket and a rerun of one of James’s guest appearances on _Iron Chef_ , possibly the one in which he looks so shocked to have won, eyes all wide and hair standing up, looking impossibly young, the cheering-section of school-friends going wild in the background; or, maybe, the one with James as guest judge, in which he’s obviously taking his responsibility seriously, making thoughtful comments, but lightening critique with a smile and a joke, putting even the nervous challenger at ease…  
  
He walks through the door, dripping water everywhere. And his sister’s voice chatters, “Oh, Michael! James, you’ll want to say hi to Michael, I’m sure—”   
  
James. James?  
  
Must be a coincidence. His sister must have a friend named James. Must’ve brought this previously unmentioned friend home for a visit. That’s logical.  
  
He squelches his way over to the sitting room door, preparing to make small talk; and then every word in the universe falls out of his head.  
  
“Oh, Michael…” Catherine sounds horrified, something about how wet he is and the carpet and him catching cold. He’s not listening.  
  
James looks up from his spot on the sofa, legs tucked up beneath him the way Michael remembers, always more comfortable that way because most furniture’s just slightly too tall. Hair falls into his face; he shakes it back, impatiently, eyes not leaving Michael’s.  
  
Those eyes are so blue. Brighter than he’d recalled. No photograph, no digital reproduction, has ever quite captured them.  
  
“Michael Fassbender,” Catherine snaps, “as the future doctor in the room, I am telling you to go change clothing. Now.”  
  
“Right,” Michael says, not hearing. Water drips off his nose.  
  
“You’d better go,” James murmurs, “I think she means it,” and that voice echoes with tartan and sunshine and chocolate and spice, glowing and rich and amused.   
  
“Right,” Michael says again, spellbound.  
  
“I should be going anyway.” James unfolds his legs. “I have some work I need to be doing, before the bakery officially opens…”  
  
“…bakery.”  
  
“Honestly, Michael, you don’t follow the news?” Catherine sighs. “Celebrity chef coming back to London, and all that?”  
  
“I…um, I didn’t—” He can’t say that yes, in fact, he’d seen that certain news item, the week before. Had sat in his office chair staring into space and doing exactly zero work for the next two hours as a result.  
  
“There’s still a lot to do.” James shrugs, apologetic. “And I have to write up some sort of announcement, people keep asking why not a full restaurant, and I’m getting tired of giving the same answer…”  
  
“Because you think dessert is the most fun.” He wants to kick himself. That’s practically a direct quote from one of James’s early pastry-competition interviews.  
  
Both James and Catherine look surprised. “Well, yes,” James says, after a second. “That, and I have diabolical plans to conquer London with pineapple-carrot cake. Look, you should really go change, you’re all soaked and I’m keeping you…”  
  
Michael shuts his mouth before the _yes you are please keep me longer_ can make it out into the open. Catherine stares at him for a second. Then, slowly, diabolically, starts to smile.  
  
“James?” Very sweet. “You can’t possibly leave now. It’s waterfalls out there. But I do have some studying to do. Big exam on Monday. Michael, why don’t you put on dry clothes, and keep James company?”  
  
“Exam in what,” Michael says, under his breath, “pure evil?” and James, evidently overhearing, smothers a laugh behind a hasty cough.  
  
“Epidemiology,” Cat retorts without batting an eye, “and James, if you’re sick, you’re positively not going anywhere,” and they’ve both clearly lost, and Michael gives in, and goes off to change, trying to ignore the butterflies lurching about in his stomach as he does so.  
  
When he comes back down, James is alone, curled up in the corner of the sofa again and watching the rain as it slides tearfully down the glass to pool on the ground.  
  
Michael stops in place, shoeless and damp-haired, because there’s a strange ache in his chest, like his heart’s confused and longing and broken and ecstatic too.  
  
The rain plays pensive melodies along the windowpane. Weaves ribbons out of water and light.  
  
James turns around even though Michael hasn’t made a sound, and smiles, but there are invisible fortress walls up now, gates and portcullises clanging into place as he watches from the outside.  
  
“I’m sorry,” James says. “I ran into Catherine, earlier—to be honest, very literally, we were both getting coffee and it was crowded and I did buy her a new pair of shoes—anyway she wouldn’t let me say no to coming back with her after, to see everyone here. I tried. I did try. She’s a force of nature.”  
  
“She is, yes…you don’t have to…you’re welcome to come back. I’d—we’d like to see you. If you want.”  
  
“Don’t.” James shakes his head, gets up, wanders over to the window, brushing fingers absently against furniture on the way: the couch arm, the side table, the lamp. They all perk up at the attention; the universe always has, Michael thinks. The world loves James, because he loves it right back, flaws and warts and mismatched fabric and all.  
  
“Don’t—wait, what? Sorry—”  
  
“Don’t pretend. Not with me. We don’t do that. You know what we agreed to, and so do I. I’ll leave when it stops raining, though, if you don’t mind. I don’t have a car, and we’re not that close to the station.”  
  
The raindrops turn into daggers, in his heart. Each one tears a new tiny hole for blood to pour through. And yet he’s desperately grateful for the storm: James is still here.  
  
“I’m not—you don’t have to leave. Please don’t leave.”  
  
“I keep my promises,” James says, to the rain.  
  
Michael has to physically reach back and catch himself on the closest chair, at that. “You—do you hate me? That much?”  
  
“No.” James turns around, looks at him, assessment tinged with startlement. “No, of course not. You gave me—everything I ever wanted. A chance at my dream. I don’t hate you.”  
  
“But you’re not happy.” The words just come out, intuition, when he looks at those eyes, before he can think better of them. “You don’t smile. In pictures. Or you do, but…it’s not…right.”  
  
“My smile isn’t right?” The eyebrows go up. “Sorry you disapprove. Didn’t realize you’d be scrutinizing.”   
  
“No, I mean—” Which is when James shoves too-long sleeves out of the way, moving an unquiet hand to pet the nearest curtain. And Michael’s poor abused heart nearly stops for good. “Your _arm_ —”  
  
“Oh…” A twitch of that elbow; the sleeve falls down again. “That’s old. Good safety lesson about bare skin and precarious saucepans and boiling sugar, though. Fun cautionary tale for chefs in training.”  
  
“My god—James, how bad—” He’s run over to the window now. To James’s side. James smiles a little crookedly, surprisedly, but doesn’t move away when Michael takes his hand, folds back his sleeve, breathes rapidly at the sight of scarred pink-white skin.  
  
“It was my own fault. Not paying attention. The arm was the worst of it…”  
  
“There’s more?”  
  
“Not too much. It splashed. A little bit under my shirt. My neck. My hands. But I heal fast, and burns happen in kitchens anyway, burns and knife-slips and…I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But. Um. Don’t tell Gran?”  
  
“No,” Michael promises, dizzy with shock, with relief, with the knowledge that James hasn’t taken his arm out of Michael’s hands yet. “No, she’d probably kill you for not telling her and then me for the same reason… _are_ you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine.” James ponders the rain. Leaves their positions unchanged. “What you said…I am happy. Don’t think that I’m not. And I’m grateful. I just wish…I’d done it on my own.”  
  
“But—but you did,” Michael fumbles out, once he can talk. “You—everything you’ve done has been—that’s all you, what you’ve accomplished—”  
  
A small headshake, waving the attempt away. Resigned. “It all happened because of you. What you offered. And, no, I don’t hate you. You were arrogant and condescending and absolutely awful, but you were trying to do the right thing. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve said yes, but I did, and I let you pay me off, because we both got what we wanted. I sometimes don’t like myself very much. That’s all.”  
  
“You—”  
  
“I think it’s stopping.” It takes him a second to figure out that James means the rain. In the gap, James adds, “I’ll be all right walking, probably.”  
  
His words aren’t working. So, when James starts to step away, Michael simply holds onto that hand, and doesn’t let go.  
  
James hesitates, for the first time since Michael’s come into the room. When the ocean-water eyes find his, they’re genuinely questioning. Not flippant or guarded or cautious behind long-held fortifications.  
  
“You…”  
  
“James. I’m sorry.”  
  
James licks his lips. Nervous, Michael thinks; that’s one habit that’s never been lost, over years and distance and pain.  
  
He holds on a little tighter. “We could…change the wording. If you want.”  
  
“Not sure even you can change a legal contract after the fact.”  
  
“Then we can make a new one. Promise me you’ll ignore that—well. That. You’re welcome here. Whenever you want. If you want to come home.”  
  
“Home.” James tests the word against the stealthy tapping of rain, returning, outside. “Promise _me_ , you said. Do you want me here?”   
  
Unflinchingly straightforward; don’t pretend, James’d said. We don’t do that. So Michael doesn’t.  
  
“Yes. I do.” Please. Redemption, somehow. Recovery. Even if he can never repair those wounds completely, even if there’s no way to make up for what he’s done, they can be friends. He hopes that they can be friends.  
  
If there’s something else there, something beyond simple friendship, the nameless emotion that’s kept him watching James’s spectacular career all these years, he pushes it down. Neither of them needs that now. Not when this truce, if that’s what this is, remains so fragile and newborn.  
  
“I…you…it’s raining again.”  
  
“It…is?”  
  
“I could stay,” James says. “For a while.”  
  
“…yes?”  
  
“Yes.” James grins, suddenly. And the eyes light up, impishly excited. It’s not the same brightness as that one shining moment locked in Michael’s memory. But it’s close. “I did mean it about needing to do work, though…can I…borrow the kitchen? Some recipe testing?”  
  
“You can borrow anything you want. What else do you need? Ingredients? I could—”  
  
“Well,” James says, shaking hair out of his eyes again, their hands still entwined, “I could use an assistant. If you wouldn’t be busy. For the next hour or so.”  
  
“I’m not busy all evening,” Michael says, mentally vowing to silence his mobile phone the second he gets the chance, and ends up breathless all over again when James smiles.


	3. take the chapstick, put it on your lips/ crack a smile, adjust my tie…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there's a multitude of baked goods, guest appearances by Sirs Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and rather a lot of champagne.

He discovers himself at James’s bakery-in-progress two days later. Not on purpose. Honestly not on purpose; he doesn’t know the address and he generally spends all day in his office, but he’d had a distributor ask to meet him over lunch, and on his way back he walks past a doorway and hears an instantly recognizable spiced-cocoa laugh, and when he backtracks enough to peek in, there’s James, perched on the edge of a countertop, paintbrush in hand and sleeves rolled up, grinning.  
  
He’s got assistants, people Michael doesn’t know, and they’re laughing too, pizza boxes in the corner, newspaper on the floor, walls half-painted, and the whole place is so flooded with sunlight and cheerfulness that it seems unreal.  
  
James hops off the countertop, done balancing on furniture for the moment, and waves at the specific bare space behind him, hands enthusiastically emphasizing whatever he’s just explained.  
  
Michael stands frozen on the sidewalk, ignoring the curses of passersby as they maneuver around him. Pulled in by the movement of those hands. Like gravity. Inescapable.  
  
Above, the sky’s wide-open and clear as a bell, a day of the kind that never exists in London ever, except it does, today. Of course it does.  
  
Michael thanks every deity he can think of that he’d needed to dress nicely. Decided to walk. Not jumped on his motorbike and bolted away, after the lunch meeting. He’s here, and he can look in this window and watch James.  
  
He’s aware that he’s likely being quite creepy. But James is laughing again.  
  
And then the blonde girl on James’s right glances out the window, spots him standing there, turns back to James. A gesture, a head tilt.  
  
Before Michael can flee, James looks.  
  
And grins. Even the sunlight gets a little more vibrant, reflected and amplified by those oceanic eyes.  
  
“Michael! Come in, absolutely come in, this is brilliant, I didn’t expect to see you here!”  
  
“I…”  
  
“Sorry about the newspaper and everything—we’ve been painting—this bit’s going to be blue and that wall’s supposed to be white, or it will be if they ever finish it—”  
  
“You’re the one who said we needed a pizza break!”  
  
“And beer. I also said beer. Of which I only got _one_ , thank you.”  
  
“We were thirsty!”  
  
“Quiet, all of you. Anyway…I know it’s not done. And it’s probably—I mean, you’re used to much nicer—but I think it’s kind of…I liked this location. When I picked it. Friendly. It wants us here.” Followed by a self-conscious half-smile, James dismissing his own words as silly; but one freckled hand pats the nearest unpainted stretch of wall, in the background.  
  
It’s not silly. Michael, looking at James, there in the blue and white and sunshine-gold world, that dream so tangible he can all but taste the chocolate, can’t imagine anything nicer. Anyplace he’d rather be.  
  
James has paint on one arm, a streak of white over the freckles. Frosting the tips of his hair, where it must’ve curled merrily into drying color.  
  
He wonders whether James would object, if he touched it. If he ran his fingers through those darkly tempting waves. Touched the kitchen-honed muscles and pinwheel freckles and silver-pink scars, visible today under carelessly shoved-up sleeves.  
  
He’s staring again, and James opens his mouth, then closes it, eyes going soft and complicatedly shy. But they stay on his, despite the hint of pink creeping across cheekbones.  
  
“So,” one of James’s myrmidons inquires, “you said his name was Michael? Do we get to meet your Michael? At last?”  
  
At last?  
  
“He’s not my Michael. He’s not _my_ anything. Michael, that’s Nicholas, who does unbelievable cake sculpting, and that’s Jen, she can decorate anything, and _this_ is Benedict, who stole my banana-oatmeal cookie recipe for a competition and then improved it—”  
  
“I was trying to impress you!”  
  
“Hired you, didn’t I? Anyway, that’s them.”  
  
“Hi,” Michael says, the word sounding inadequate in the wake of the effusive introductions.  
  
“Everyone,” James says, brightly, “this is Michael. Don’t frighten him.”  
  
“We’re not frightening.”  
  
“Is this frightening?”  
  
“That’s you pretending to eat a paintbrush, so no.”  
  
“Pretending?”  
  
“Disturbing, now, but still not frightening, no.”  
  
“He doesn’t look easily frightened. James, is he easily frightened?”  
  
“If he dies of fright, can I have his suit? It looks nice.”  
  
 _“Benedict!”_  
  
“Sorry, James.”  
  
“You’re all on dishwashing duty,” James proclaims amiably. “Until you learn how to behave around guests. Michael, they’re a horde of untrained monkeys, I’m apologizing on behalf of the lot of them. It is a nice suit; you may not want to stand around in here with the wet paint…”  
  
Michael, who finds himself very much wanting to stand around in there, opens his mouth, searches around the room for assistance, and spots a spare paint roller, lying invitingly on the floor.  
  
James follows his gaze. “Oh, no…no, you don’t have to, you really will ruin that suit and—”  
  
Michael takes off his jacket. Looks at blue eyes.  
  
“Seriously,” James says, “you don’t need to—I mean, this is basically manual labor, they’re getting paid to be here, you must have better uses for your afternoon than—”  
  
“Not really, no.”  
  
“But…” The seawater gaze now looks very confused. Baffled little ripples on the surface of the ocean.   
  
“You’re too short to reach the wall over those counters, anyway.”  
  
The three-person horde of cake-decorating lunatics snickers, at that.   
  
“But,” James tries, “ _Michael_ ,” as if that name’s enough to make his argument. Michael rolls up his sleeves.   
  
“You can work on this bit next to me,” Jennifer says, sounding fascinated.  
  
“James,” Michael says, “where do you want me?”  
  
“Are you _sure_ ,” James says, one final futile attempt. But the eyes say something slightly different, Michael thinks. Something like perplexity, and surprise, and hope.  
  
Maybe that last one’s only wishful thinking.   
  
But maybe it isn’t. Maybe, he thinks again, when James gives up and smiles at him and answers his question with, “You can help me finish this wall.”  
  
  
The opening, freshly-painted walls and all, goes not merely well, but phenomenally well. Bodies appear from nowhere and demand baked goods. The shop’s constantly packed. Early reviews, appearing in magazines and on blogs and in critic’s guides, employ phrases such as “decadent,” “innovative,” and “whimsically delicious.” James laughs out loud at that last one, and then vanishes into the test kitchen to invent something complicated and fanciful involving spun sugar in green and gold dragon-scale shapes, scattered around a gilt-dusted heap of chocolate treasure.  
  
That one goes on display for a few hours, and attracts a record number of captivated customers. James starts giving away the dragon scales to small children. Michael, astonished, protests, “Wait, hang on,” and snaps pictures with his mobile phone. “That’s a work of art, you can’t just dismantle it.”  
  
“It’s meant to be enjoyed,” James says, and hands over another piece of glittering sugar.  
  
Fortunately, there are a few reporters and food critics present, hidden in the crowd. Michael’s hasty snapshots prove redundant, as splashier and less blurry photos of James being his cheerfully generous self make the news, and the world falls even more in love with that Scottish-accented kind-hearted warmth.   
  
Michael keeps his own pictures anyway. Leaves them saved, accompanying him wherever he goes, on his phone.   
  
He finds himself rearranging his workdays so that he can leave the office around lunchtime on a daily basis. It’s not as if he doesn’t set his own schedule. He doesn’t mind catching up on paperwork at night, not when he gets to spend the afternoon being conducted back behind the counters with a wink and a wave from one of James’s assistants, not when he’s greeted by the scents of butter and sugar and berries and brandy, and the slow kindling smile in dark blue eyes when James looks up from pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookies or key-lime panna cotta or a tower of croquembouche to spot him coming in.  
  
The other customers, trapped outside the hallowed kitchen doors, start eying him jealously. Michael smiles toothily at them all, and starts bringing over coffee, for everyone because he knows that James will like that, for James because by afternoon even the normally buoyant hair starts growing tired, especially when James orders his assistants to take breaks and forgets to do the same.  
  
Besides, it’s something he can do. Something no one else, not any of those _other_ customers, or the most vocal of the excitable fans, gets to do.  
  
James has a rather impressive legion of fans, truth be told. Michael’s known this intellectually for quite some time—there’re a multitude of blogs devoted to his career, though several of them seem in fact more devoted to his eyes and hair—but ends up having to set up a second email account just to handle all the alert notifications each time a new post or review pops up.   
  
James adores his fans, and tends to give away free samples of whatever he’s working on to anyone who shows interest. Michael points out that they’re likely to catch on, and then the shop’ll be deluged by demanding followers. James laughs, and observes that his admirers tend to be good people, loyal people, and will likely purchase something anyway while there, to support them.   
  
This ought, by any reasonable standard of human behavior, to be unbelievably naïve; to Michael’s mingled frustration and relief, however, it proves to in fact be the case. James smiles at him serenely, and even hands over the accounts for Michael to inspect. Michael spends several hours with the numbers, especially in the wake of James’s offhand, “not really my specialty, you know, not exactly edible…”, and is forced to conclude that not only are they not losing money, they’re making more than they’d known.  
  
Without anyone really saying anything, he starts taking over the bakery’s accounting, over the next few weeks. He does like numbers. Always has.   
  
James smiles at him again, a fleetingly uncertain edge to the upward curve. Doesn’t ask for the responsibility back, or offer to pay him—which Michael wouldn’t’ve accepted—but does begin sending small wrapped packages of baked goods home with him, round-baked soft rolls and peach cobbler and miniature maple-glazed candied-bacon doughnuts, snuck into jacket pockets or handed over at the last second with a sunny smile, so that Michael doesn’t have a chance to say no.  
  
The doughnuts don’t actually make it home. He can’t take the risk of having to share.  
  
James doesn’t comment, but that particular recipe makes a more frequent reappearance on the menu, after that.  
  
One morning there’s a phone call from the Food Network. Michael, arriving for the afternoon, hears about it in the aftermath, Jen grumbling indistinctly about turning down Hollywood and fame and overseas stardom. “The Food Network’s based in New York,” Nicholas observes mildly, and returns to carving blocks of cake into some sort of furry monster-shape.  
  
James, unusually, is rather quiet, giving more attention than necessary to routine sugar-roses. Michael steps over there next to him. Lowers his voice. “Everything all right?”  
  
“They offered me a job.” James doesn’t look up. “More accurately…a show. Television. They wanted us to come set up in America and be filmed. Evidently I’d appeal to their target audience.”  
  
James would appeal to everyone, but Michael’s too busy being tentatively relieved by the past tense of that statement to say so. “You said…no?”  
  
The hands stop, at last. The eyes drift up, and find his. He’s not sure what James might be seeing there, but whatever it is, it earns a smile, any last shreds of second-guessing evaporating like mist. “I did. I want to stay here.”  
  
“Good,” Michael says, the first word that comes to mind, and that smile gets a bit wider, and James feeds him a pink-and-white rose.  
  
The fame is a good thing. James deserves all the recognition, the praise, the celebrity. He’s a genius. More than that, he’s worked hard for this. He’s earned it all, and more.  
  
And Michael snarls softly under his breath each time his phone lights up with a fan-post about the dreaminess of those eyes or speculation regarding just how powerful all those firm muscles might be. There’s nothing wrong with the speculation, of course not, but James is more than gorgeous eyes and sturdy strength. James is kind and funny and dedicated and passionate and complicated, and the eyes are the same eyes that belonged to the tiny freckle-nosed boy who’d sat on countertops making perfect toast to feed his family.  
  
James also has a wicked sense of humor, which the better interviewers and his favorite customers get to see. One of those favorite customers turns out to be an extremely famous celebrity, who wanders into the shop shortly before closing, wearing a pink-striped tie and an ear-to-ear grin. “James?”  
  
“Ian!” James actually jumps over the counter, and lets himself be swept up into a hug and back-pat. Michael, left behind beside an oven, where he’s been surreptitiously shifting tomorrow’s afternoon conference call to the following morning, feels bereft, although that feeling’s partially overshadowed by the realization that _Sir Ian McKellen_ is ruffling James’s hair.  
  
James is friends with Gandalf the Grey. Magneto. Practically every other iconic role in the cinema universe. Michael can’t work out whether to be surprised or unsurprised by this fact. Of course Ian McKellen would love James. Everyone does.  
  
The man’s _still_ hugging James. Surely that’s enough hugging. James has work to do.  
  
“You seem to be doing well. Sorry we couldn’t get here sooner; filming, you know…”  
  
“Oh, no, I’m completely thrilled you made it at all! I heard you were in New Zealand, and I thought, well, you sent the champagne, so—”  
  
So. That’s where the case of sparkling wine’d come from. Michael’s now regretting having enjoyed it so much, when James’d opened a bottle in celebration of finished renovations.  
  
“I brought a friend.” Ian waves. “Patrick, come say hello. James is marvelous, I’ve known him since he made a cupcake tower for that premiere party two years ago, I think you two will get on splendidly.”  
  
Patrick _Stewart_. Sir Ian McKellen’s brought Sir Patrick Stewart into James’s shop. Michael, who’d brought James a single cup of coffee that afternoon—which James hadn’t even finished, distracted by an oven’s failure to heat evenly—feels something twinge vengefully in his chest.  
  
“I ought to warn you, I’m not the biggest fan of desserts in general…” But Patrick’s gazing around with delight at the cheery walls, at the confectionary displays, at James’s blinding smile. “But Ian insisted, and, well, it’s very hard to say no…”  
  
“ _Cupcakes_ ,” Ian rhapsodizes, longingly.  
  
James tips his head to one side, scrutinizing Patrick right back. “Nothing too sweet. Spice cake, Earl-Grey infused, lavender essence?”  
  
Patrick blinks. Ian smirks. Even more so at the expression following that first bite.  
  
“My god. You’re going to make a fortune. Remind me to place orders years in advance so you’ve got time for me.”  
  
“I’ll always have time for you, sir,” James promises, eyes twinkling, and, god, is he flirting? James is flirting with Patrick fucking Stewart, who’s beaming in response, and that’s not fair, that’s not right, Michael’s the one who brought him coffee and remembered that he likes cinnamon syrup and that he loathes early mornings but will roll out of bed at four am to start wrestling bread dough.  
  
Michael’s also the one responsible for the near-invisible permanent edge of wariness behind those blue eyes, cool reserve under walls of friendliness like frost lining a freezer. I let you pay me off, James says wearily, in his head, looking into the rain. We both got what we wanted.   
  
He wonders for the first time, watching James sparkle at Sir Patrick some more, and Patrick appreciate him back, whether James had meant the words to sound that way. Whether James genuinely thinks of himself as a whore.   
  
“James,” Ian begs, “you’re stealing my partner away. With cupcakes. He doesn’t even like cupcakes. Where’s mine?”  
  
“Hands _off_ ,” Patrick says, as Ian tries to sneak a fingerful of icing.   
  
“What do you want?” James inquires, laughing. His hair tumbles into his eyes. “I’ve not made the strawberries and cream today, sorry…”  
  
Ian sighs, melodramatically. “I’ll survive.” And then brightens up, hopeful. “Do you recall the cake you made for my birthday party? The one with the raspberry layers, and the chocolate spirals?”  
  
“I am not baking you a whole cake,” James says. “Not this afternoon, anyway, I’ve got coconut meringues to finish. I’m not magical.”  
  
“Yes you are,” Michael says, completely inadvertently. Fortunately, Ian says it louder, and more wistfully.  
  
James blushes, laughs, looks briefly thoughtful. Then vaults back over the counter and heads for the kitchen. “Ten minutes, don’t go anywhere!”  
  
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Ian makes another attempt at Patrick’s frosting. Patrick leans away.  
  
“James?” More plaintive than he’d meant, following James back to the stovetops. But James looks so excitedly busy. Cheerful and intent on the challenge.  
  
“Michael,” James says right back, “hand me the vanilla extract, would you? Thanks. And also…thanks.”  
  
“For…what?”  
  
A shrug, or something that would’ve been a shrug if James weren’t pouring out vanilla. “In general. Everything. The cinnamon coffee, earlier. I think I forgot to say at the time. So, thank you.”  
  
“That’s…you don’t have to…I wanted to.” Their fingers touch, when he hands over the next requested spoon.  
  
James glances up at him, eyes affectionate and, for once, unprotected, defenses lowered, vivid and deep and intimate. Private sapphire pools, under tropical sun. Michael’s breathless, diving in.  
  
James’s favorite minion chooses this moment to pop up. “What’s that?”  
  
“Shh,” James says. “You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”  
  
“I don’t like surprises,” Benedict says. “They make me nervous. James, did you know Captain Picard’s in the shop? Eating a cupcake?”  
  
“He’s a friend.” Because having known James for five minutes and praising a baked good and flirtatious glances all add up to friendship, somehow.  
  
“Michael?”  
  
“…what? Sorry.”  
  
“You look incredibly disapproving. Displeased. Disgruntled. Is it too much white chocolate? Too thick?”  
  
“Why does your entire vocabulary begin with the letter d? And…you’re the expert. I wouldn’t know.”  
  
“Only the words for you,” James retorts promptly and nonsensically, and does something complicated with what resembles a syringe full of purple fruit-scented mousse. “Okay, come on.”  
  
There’s a small expectant audience by the time they re-emerge. In part this is because Patrick and Ian’re obliviously happily engaging in public displays of affection involving tea-infused frosting and each other’s fingers, and in part because Ian keeps loudly telling people that James is busy making a special creation just for him.  
  
“Stop that,” James says. “This is an experiment. Might not be good.”  
  
Every person in the room, and possibly on the planet, pauses to regard him with incredulity.  
  
“I’m just saying,” James defends himself, and sets down the plate.  
  
Ian considers the simple white-chocolate shell. Plain and creamy, it gazes up in return. Patrick raises eyebrows; James smiles angelically and hands over a fork.  
  
When the fork meets the shell, fluffy purple-black raspberry filling erupts over the tines. Explodes across the plate. Cascades onto Ian’s hand.   
  
“You did ask for raspberries,” that playful Scottish accent observes into the awed silence, and Ian bursts out laughing, and the audience applauds. Even the foggy London day gets lighter, appreciatively, outside.  
  
“My god,” Patrick announces, “it’s the tragedy of Macbeth in dessert form. Thunderstorms and all.”  
  
James grins, bounces over to the _Daily Specials!_ chalkboard, and scribbles, handwriting messy as ever, _The Tragedy Of Macbeth With Raspberry Thunderstorms Now Available By Request!_ And then turns around and bows extravagantly. “Thank you for the name.”  
  
“If you two are going to be this melodramatic together,” Ian sighs, “we need more of that champagne.”  
  
“Give me an hour to finish and close up,” James says instantly, “and it’s a date.”  
  
Michael looks at Patrick. Who looks back at him and shrugs: resignation and adoration, the look of a long-suffering partner, still head over heels in love.  
  
Michael’s not James’s partner. Doesn’t have that right.   
  
But he lets himself pretend for a moment that he does. No one else will ever have to know.  
  
  
Hours on, he’s lost track of how many expensive bottles they’ve drained, rose-pink and palest gold and transparent topaz. The bubbles spin in glasses, in the air, across his tongue.  
  
He’s still better off than James. Who, at the moment, is using a piping bag to very intently draw a very rude shape on Ian’s arm in mango-flavored icing. They’re both laughing, which is preventing the artistic endeavor from turning out any sort of well.  
  
“James,” he tries, “can I…get you water? Or food? Or something?”  
  
“Good luck,” Patrick says, “I tried that with mine about an hour ago, and then decided it’d be easier  to join them,” and goes back to, from all appearances, constructing a miniature castle out of emptied bottles. “Towers over here…”  
  
Michael gives up on that corner for now. “James? How’re you feeling?”  
  
“Michael!” James says, happily. “If you come here I can decorate you too. You might be easier than him. He moves around too much.”  
  
“I do not,” Ian says, mock-dignified, “and you, James, are very…extremely…drunk. You’ve made it lopsided.”  
  
“I have not.” James tips his head to the side. “Maybe a little. Your fault. All the moving…”  
  
“He actually is quite drunk,” Ian confides to Michael, in what’s probably meant to be a whisper. “James can normally decorate _anything_.”  
  
Michael represses a fleeting urge to thump his head against the nearest countertop. When has he become the sane and sober one, again?  
  
But he knows the answer to that. The when had been around two champagne bottles ago, when he’d steadied James with one hand and looked down into tipsy sapphire eyes and recalled that, yes, James does have a fairly high alcohol tolerance, and possibly even outweighs Michael’s leaner longer self by a hairsbreadth, but James also has spent the past few days running on single-digit hours of sleep and devoting every waking moment to baked goods, and has less than no reserves left to draw upon.  
  
Michael’d sworn off champagne for himself for the night in the wake of that realization, hoping to at least be sober enough to catch him when the adrenaline and nervous energy give out at last.    
  
At this point James attempts to stand up and reach for him, and Michael’s mildly impaired reflexes get severely tested.  
  
“James!”  
  
“Oh, hello…” James loops his arms around Michael’s neck. “Good thing you were there. I think that chair just tried to trip me. Not very nice of it, really.”  
  
“I don’t think it was the chair. I do think you should eat something.” He steers James over to a different chair. Pushes him down. James seems disinclined to let go, which makes the next few moments difficult.  
  
“I need you to not hold on to my hand.”  
  
“I like your hand.” James plays with Michael’s fingers, sliding his own across them, one by one. “Your hand is…different. From mine.”  
  
“Yes,” Michael says, carefully extricating himself, leaving his heart behind, “we’re different people. What do you have that I can feed you?”  
  
“You want to feed me?” The blue eyes brighten up. Michael takes a deep breath. Counts to ten. In English, then in German. Then in Gaelic, and French.  
  
“Answer the question, please.”  
  
“Um…yesterday’s gingerbread? Over there, on the shelf…no, not that shelf…the other one…on the left. I mean your left. Sorry.”  
  
“How drunk _are_ you?”  
  
“I’m not,” James says indignantly. “I’m fantastic. You’re fantastic. And so is that champagne. The pink one.”  
  
“Eat this.” He watches while James does. Then breaks off another piece. Hands it over.  
  
“They have baked goods,” Ian says, waking up. “Patrick. Why do they have baked goods?”  
  
Michael sighs out loud—none of them will notice anyway—and walks over to Patrick and whispers, “I will give you _two_ of the leftover berry tarts if you get yourselves into a cab right now.” James won’t miss them at the moment, and won’t mind, later.  
  
Patrick, suddenly more alert at the prospect of pastries, nods, and then looks at James. “What about—”  
  
“I’ll take care of him. Go.”  
  
“Um. Sorry.”  
  
“It’s fine,” Michael says, because it is, really. James is smiling at him and had held his hand and had needed this, the outlet, the celebration, the relief after the ebbing of the crazed opening-week tidal wave. They’re closed tomorrow. James can sleep it off and be all right.   
  
And he doesn’t mind taking care of James.  
  
He waves the other two away, and comes back to James’s chair.  
  
Except James isn’t there. “James?”  
  
“Kitchen!”  
  
“What’re you doing?”  
  
“Frosting?” James widens bottomless eyes at him, all blurry black and blue. “For the gingerbread. It needs frosting. It’s naked.”  
  
Michael resists the urge to perform a literal face-palm move, with some effort. And then resists the urge to contemplate James and nakedness in the same sentence, with even more effort.  
  
“Are you nearly done?”  
  
“Um…almost. Here, taste this.” And there’s a fingertip in Michael’s face, frosted with white cream.  
  
“Oh god,” he says, out loud, which is a bad idea because James simply puts the finger in his mouth.  
  
It’s delicious. Sugary and cool and creamy, and under that some indefinable taste that’s ginger-gilt freckles and warm skin and James, more intoxicating than all the champagne in the universe. Michael feels more off-balance than before he’d stopped drinking.  
  
James laughs. “Licking me?”  
  
Oh god. “Um…you’re drunk. This is you being very, very drunk. Come on, let’s get you home.”  
  
“Frosting?” James asks hopefully, and Michael sighs yet again and can’t say no to those plaintive eyes. The frosting, plus the gingerbread, comes with them back to James’s flat, fortunately not too far away and an easy address to remember, though it takes James a minute to work out what number Michael’s asking him for.  
  
“Keys?”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“For your door?”  
  
“Oh…here…oh, wait, other pocket…no, hang on, I was right the first time. They’re very pointy.”  
  
“They’re your _keys_. Which one?”  
  
“The pointy one?”  
  
In the end Michael takes them away and opens the door himself, after one wrong guess, and steers them all inside, supporting James and catching the gingerbread plate and kicking the door shut with one unoccupied limb.   
  
James’s flat is a lot like its owner: tiny, demonstrative, untidy in specific ways and orderly in others. The kitchen’s spotless; the furniture, however, seems to’ve been chosen for comfort rather than style, and there’s a stack of Star Trek novels colonizing the couch. Their fantasy cousins have already conquered the bookshelf.  
  
The way to the bedroom’s obvious, really only one other option, so he half-carries James that way. James does not make this easy, evidently deciding that his current role in life is to cling to Michael like solid sweet caramel to a spoon.  
  
“You feel all warm. Like a radiator.”  
  
“Are you cold?”  
  
“Usually. I have that…it’s that…thing. You know. Blood circulation thing. Not serious. But that’s why warm things’re nice. Kitchens. Ovens. You.” James inspects a hand as if he’s never seen it before. “Sometimes my fingers turn blue. When they’re not warm.”  
  
Michael, who’d _not_ known, and who is now trying to remember how to breathe, thinking of every time he’s seen James out in the rain, in winter, on needle-sharp days, deadly clear and diamond-edged, forces out, around the needles, “Tell me what you need.”  
  
“You,” James proclaims, and tucks his face into Michael’s neck, and throws the other arm around him too. James’s nose is cold. Michael, someplace deep inside, feels his heart wanting to cry.  
  
He walks them both very carefully over to the bed. Detaches those arms, and disentangles himself, and envelops James in the folds of every blanket he can find. “Better?”  
  
James blinks at him, a messy-haired tiny owl in a nest of bedding. “But. _You_.”  
  
“I’m…I’ll just…I’m going to get you water. Okay?”   
  
“But you’ll come back.”  
  
“I just said—yes. Of course yes. I’ll be right back. With water for you. All right?”  
  
“Then you can go,” James decides, emphatically imperious, and makes a motion that’s probably a grand wave of dismissal. Hard to tell, under all the blankets.  
  
Michael nods, not trusting his voice, and flees.  
  
He finds the kitchen light-switch and finds a glass and finds water from the fridge dispenser and then finds himself with both elbows braced on the smooth granite countertop for a while, head down and looking at nothing in particular while he breathes.  
  
By the time he gets back to the bedroom, James is asleep.  
  
Michael stands there beside the bed, water in hand. The abrupt sea-change, energetic cuddling and confessions into peaceful silence, is disorienting. Like a story ending too soon, incomplete, unfulfilled.  
  
He ought to wake James up, make him drink water, keep him hydrated. He looks at closed blue eyes, lashes resting like a thick dark carpet over freckle-sprinkles. He can’t.  
  
He leaves the water, finds aspirin in a cupboard and leaves that too, and goes out and nudges the Star Trek books onto the coffee table and stretches out on the couch. It _is_ as comfortable as its appearance promises. Naturally. It wouldn’t dare be anything else; it belongs to James.  
  
He uses his own jacket as a barely adequate half-blanket. He’s not about to go take one from the bed.  
  
Tell me what you need, he’d said. And James had said, simply, disarmingly, alcohol-flushed, one word. You.  
  
Alone in the welcoming dark of the flat, Michael closes his eyes.  
  
The impression of short sturdy warmth lingers, all along his body. Everywhere, where James’d pressed up too close against him, imprinted into his skin, his bones, his soul.  
  
He does know that James is, if not exactly gay, at least not opposed to dating men. He owes this tidbit of knowledge to the irrepressible Benedict, who’d been teasing James about precisely that while they’d still been setting up tables and chairs: “…it’s kind of a shame you let the Norse god go, you know the one I mean, Chris, right, with the blond hair and all the muscles, he could’ve carried ten tables at once…”  
  
James had snorted in a manner that suggested he was entirely done with the previously unmentioned Chris, and dropped a chair into place with somewhat more force than necessary, and then cast a slightly anxious glance Michael’s way.  
  
Michael, torn between the welcome surprise that James wouldn’t be averse to looking that direction and, conversely, simmering jealousy regarding god-like young blonds with all the muscles, had realized after a second why James was worried. Had nearly laughed, because that’d been the last thing on his mind, but had shrugged, instead, a small gesture of shoulders, a wryly honest smile: of course he’d not mind. Definitely not.  
  
James’d smiled back, clouds lifting, and said, “He’s got a fiancé now,” and the conversation’d promptly been overtaken by demands about details and how James knows said details, and also how he can be so genuinely happy about his ex finding true love while James himself is—  
  
Jennifer’s sentence had stopped abruptly, as if someone’d kicked her hard, out of sight.   
  
James’d raised both eyebrows. Said, gently, “While I’m what, famous and doing what I love and surrounded by friends…?” and all those friends had, gingerly, smiled.  
  
And, across the forest of tables and chairs, James’s gaze had found Michael’s again, summer-sundown blue meeting dusty mint, and lingering there.  
  
Of course he shouldn’t’ve expected James to be celibate. James is young and kind and brilliant and heartstoppingly beautiful, the kind of unexpected extraordinary loveliness that turns heads on a train, in a crowded station, entering a pub. Anyone, everyone, would want to be with him.  
  
Michael hopes, lying in the darkness, cradled by the protective cushions of the sofa, that James has at least chosen partners who’ve been kind to him, in return. His heart aches, a dull kind of stab, at the idea that maybe James hasn’t, that maybe James, who even now blushes at and deflects all compliments directed his way, doesn’t know how to deal with kindness. Not from other people, offered to him.  
  
There’s that stab again. Blunt and painful. Like fist-shaped bruises.  
  
Michael himself hasn’t been entirely celibate, either, but it’s been a long time. He’d slept with a few women, trying to convince himself he couldn’t want James; he’d slept with a few men, trying to convince himself he shouldn’t only want James. He’d technically had relationships with one or two of them, for one or two months.   
  
Those hadn’t been fair to anyone involved. He can admit that, to the dispassionate night; he’d known it then, too. None of them were bad people. Not their fault they didn’t have the right eyes, the right laugh, the encyclopedic knowledge of arcane science-fiction trivia, the spontaneous generosity. Not their fault they couldn’t be James.  
  
He’s always wanted James. He wants James now.  
  
Even more than that, he wants James to feel safe. To be with whomever he wants, to be whatever he wants, to have warm hands and a cheeky smile and to never feel cold again.  
  
Maybe he can buy James a pair of gloves, in the morning. James might try to say no, might not want any gift if Michael’s the giver, but his hands’re his livelihood, he has to take care of them, right? That’s practical.   
  
The fluffiest, warmest gloves in existence, then. Something woolly. And blue. James likes blue.  
  
The space of the flat, compassionately listening, seems to approve of that idea. The refrigerator, out in the kitchen, hums.  
  
Michael breathes in and out and lets the purr of it coax him into sleep. He’ll be there when James wakes up, in a few more hours.  
  
  
James, of course, manages to derail this plan. He’s already awake and alert and in the kitchen when Michael opens bleary eyes to the scent and sizzle of pancakes.  
  
“You’re _up_.” Evidently his own brain isn’t, yet. He mentally blames James for this. Not following the plan. Not even a headache in evidence, as far as he can tell, which is fundamentally unfair.   
  
“I am.” James flourishes a spatula at him. “Banana-walnut pancakes? With cinnamon?”  
  
“Um,” Michael says, “yes,” and then, because James is only wearing a thin t-shirt and pajama pants, walks over and places his jacket over those broad shoulders.  
  
James looks startled, then has to grab a sleeve with a spare hand to keep it from sliding off, then wriggles into it, blue eyes and ruffled hair emerging from dark leather. Tips his head to the side, contemplating the offering, expression unaccustomedly grave.  
  
“You’re not even hung over,” Michael says accusingly, just for something to say.  
  
“I hardly ever feel it, the morning after.” James shrugs, shakes hair out of his eyes. The motion draws attention to the line of his throat, caressed by Michael’s clothing. “And I _did_ feel like pancakes.”  
  
“You could’ve woken me up…” So that he could’ve helped. With the pancakes.  
  
“No,” James says, but he’s smiling now, “you looked so happy, there, with my sofa. Didn’t want to disturb the two of you. Here, try this, tell me if they need more of anything. Cinnamon, walnuts…”  
  
And then, once Michael’s mouth’s full: “And thank you. For last night. You didn’t have to.”  
  
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Michael says, swallowing the last bite, meeting that flicker of sapphire trepidation with utter truthfulness. “This is perfect.”  
  
And James grins like morning sunshine, and pushes up Michael’s jacket-sleeves along his arms, and flips another pancake over, flawless timing, on the stove.


	4. first the window, then it’s to the wall…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there's another party, and Michael says some very foolish things (again)...

Another party. Another party at the Fassbender estate, complete with one of James’s original cake-creations, now decimated by appreciative guests. Déjà vu, Michael thinks. Or maybe just hell.  
  
The bone-white scythe of the moon emerges from clouds just long enough to concur with this assessment. Then it hides behind greyness again. Even the weather’s feeling grim and unhelpful, tonight.   
  
This specific cake is for Michael’s father’s birthday. The annual gathering’s always an enormous affair, free-flowing liquor and lavish decorations and no expense spared; his father’d wanted one of James’s cakes in part because it’s James and in part because James is so in demand, Michael suspects.  
  
It’d been an assumption, really, his father saying to him in the midst of a lengthy treatise on golf and retirement, “…and of course you’ll ask young James to come up with something for me, tell him I like chocolate, right, and anyway at the ninth hole there was this water hazard, and so I said to the caddy, I’m never going in there, son…”  
  
Michael’d broached the subject to James tentatively on the following day, tangled in a web of obligation and embarrassment and self-consciousness, very aware that he shouldn’t be asking James for favors, shouldn’t be asking James for anything at all.  
  
James’d paused in the midst of scone-preparation, both hands flour-dusted and actively occupied. “What flavor does he want, then?”  
  
“You don’t have to. I mean. I know you’re busy.” I know you shouldn’t want to do anything I’m asking, he didn’t say.  
  
The pale city-filtered sunlight splashed in through the window. Caught in James’s hair, highlighted all the freckles on that nose. Made him look about twelve years old, flour on his cheek, blissfully inventing new uses for coconut without a care in the world.  
  
“I don’t mind,” James’d said, and smiled at him. “Your parents’ve always been kind to me.”  
  
That had stung, even though James manifestly didn’t mean it to. Like the cold clear sunbeams, little spears striking tiny blows against his skin.  
  
“He probably won’t even pay you. He thinks of you as…”  
  
“As family,” James had finished. “I know. It’s fine, Michael, really. What flavor?”  
  
James had said his name, in that glorious accent. Had let those sounds slide off his tongue, casually comfortable with the taste of them there.  
  
“…um. Chocolate?”  
  
“Chocolate what? Plain chocolate’s not terribly original, though it is delicious.”  
  
“Is it? Both?”  
  
“Yes. Do you think you could possibly bring me some of your whiskey?”  
  
“Of course.” Better than _anything you want_ , though not by much, and probably too instantaneous, at that. “Any particular criteria? Age, cask type, character…”  
  
“I’m planning to put it in chocolate. What d’you think?”  
  
“The 18-year limited reserve,” Michael’d said promptly. “Mellow, toffee and spice and vanilla notes, nuttiness?”  
  
“Sounds promising.”  
  
“Or you can have the experimental one we’re not selling yet. Peppery. Sherry casks. Should I just bring you everything? You can try them all.”  
  
“Yes,” James’d said, looking at him with an odd expression, sideways under all the escaping hair, intrigued, speculative. “Anything you want to bring over. For me to try.”  
  
In the chilly dark light of evening, artificial lampgleam and laughter, Michael looks around for him now. Spots him standing with Catherine, talking away, both hands in motion, making some sort of complicated exuberant shape in the air.  
  
James is so damn beautiful. Under the plushness of honeyed sunshine; or conjuring brand-new scrumptiousness out of air and disparate ingredients, with cocoa on his arms and rolled-up sleeves; or champagne-tipsy and laughing at him; or here and now, dressed up for the occasion in stylish jeans and a jacket that fits him so enticingly that Michael’s mouth goes dry, here and now and brilliant and unmissable as the sun, the heart of Michael’s personal solar system, radiance even though it’s been cloudy all day and is currently nighttime to boot.  
  
He’s not looking at Michael. Of course he’s not; James gives his entire attention to the person he’s with. Gets them each, every time, to feel like the most important person in the world. Michael knows that. He does know.   
  
James keeps smiling at Catherine.  
  
James had been smiling at _him_ , the week before, in the soft secret hush of the bakery after hours, the cozy lull after all the feet’d clattered out the door, the lights over the counters flipped from on to off, the scents of plum and cocoa and molasses in the air. Michael’d succumbed to that irresistible gravitational pull then, too. When James had turned all that ocean-blue intentness on him, and he’d felt the same way. Special. Worthwhile. Important.  
  
How everyone always feels, caught in James’s smile. Every person, every time.   
  
It’s nothing to do with him. Nothing he has any right to want all for himself. To want at all.  
  
They’d ended up trying all the whiskey-chocolate combinations either of them could think of, settling on the 18-year that’d been Michael’s first instinct, and then trying them all again just to make sure.  
  
Michael’d had to work all afternoon, not particularly unpleasant work—checking on maturation of stock, flavor testing, and so on—but obligations he’d not been able to reschedule. They’d kept him from running off to the apples-and-nutmeg world of the bakery for the entire length of the day. And he’d had bottles sitting under his desk since that morning, and restlessness scampering through his veins, dancing up and down his spine, keeping him from sitting still.  
  
He’d escaped as soon as he finally could. Flung himself inside the bakery doors just as Benedict was flipping the sign to ‘Closed’, and then leaned against the counter, panting, trying to collect breath and a less disheveled appearance before looking for James.  
  
Who’d peeked out of the kitchen at that precise moment, blue gaze a little hesitant, as if he’d given up expecting Michael to come; but the hesitance gave way to a smile, and a head-tilt invitation: what’re you waiting for, come on…  
  
Michael’s father’s presently loudly announcing to anyone who’ll listen how much he loves his whiskey-spiked chocolate birthday cake, even if they’ve heard the booming proclamation three times before. To be fair, it is his party, and it’s more or less a Fassbender family tradition to spend one’s birthday pleasantly alcohol-soaked.  
  
He starts attempting to maneuver over to James’s side. Gets waylaid by one of his father’s golf cronies, who wants to inform him at length that despite what anyone’s saying that story about the nine-iron and the peacock egg is not true. “Right,” Michael agrees desperately, and then runs into his mother, who hugs him and says “Thank you for arranging the cake!” and then, “Did you give away one of the black barrel reserve bottles? Because those aren’t for distribution yet.”  
  
“I know, I know, I—”  
  
“I know you know, which is why—”  
  
“It was for James,” Michael interjects, when he can find two seconds of space.  
  
“Oh,” she says, “never mind, that’s all right then,” and wanders off.   
  
Michael stands there for a minute wondering when every single person in his family has fallen head over heels for blue eyes and shortness and unruly hair and talented hands. And then watches his sister whisper something in James’s ear, confidentially low. And _then_ the wondering’s not funny anymore.  
  
James had fed him bites of chocolate cake, richly spiced and oven-hot and flavored with notes of peat-smoke and pepper and vanilla and alcohol, the two of them standing very close in the haven of the kitchen, surrounded by pools of light and the scent of baked goods and aged whiskey, deep gold and serene. Had fed him by hand, because he’d put Michael to work, laughing: “You can be my assistant, I could use one, honestly, my hands would kind of enjoy the rest…”  
  
Michael, taking over the mixing-bowl duties on the spot, had known he was half-joking. Had nevertheless glanced at those hands, broad and dexterous and knife-nicked and bearing the scars of old burns.  
  
James’s rare deliberate smile’d appeared, catching that look. Not the coruscating firework grin tossed to journalists and customers. More private, and sweeter, and thoughtful, wistful as a drift of spun sugar through an airy afternoon.  
  
That’d been when he’d pulled the first ventures out of the oven, and held out a fork with cake balanced on the prongs, luscious and complex and dark with flavor. Offered it right up to Michael’s lips, blue eyes wickedly merry.   
  
Michael’d taken that first bite with a feeling of inevitability, as if it ought to be an apple, as if he’d always been going to fall.  
  
James had smiled at him again with pure exultant victory, once they’d made a decision—once they’d toasted the decision properly, with even more whiskey—and Michael’d smiled back, and wanted to stay in the moment forever, himself and James here working together, seamless and perfect and so damned much fun.  
  
And then James had yawned, scrunching up his nose with unwary adorableness, and Michael had realized belatedly that James would’ve been up at four in the morning to wrestle bread dough into submission, and then had stayed late at his, Michael’s, request, working without complaint on a complicated favor.  
  
“James,” he’d said, “bed,” even while his chest ached, a strange kind of hollow hurt. “Come on, I’ll take you.”  
  
“Hmm?” Another yawn; James was nearly asleep on his feet. “Sorry. Whiskey, long day, early morning…”  
  
“I know. On the bike, please.” He’d got James out the door, pausing to grab keys and lock up when it became clear that James might need more than one try to figure out the key-into-keyhole mechanism. Had felt that ache creep up into his throat, when James slid into place behind him on the bike and slipped worn-out arms around him and rested that head against his back. So _right_ , there. Like coming home.  
  
Home, he’d reminded himself, and sternly conducted them to James’s, and opened that door and steered drowsy sapphire eyes through it and down the hall and to bed. James had blinked at him, sleepily, curling into pillows. They snuggled up to him like lonely cats; James’d blinked again, opened his mouth, and Michael knew, positively _knew_ , the first words were going to be some form of thank you.  
  
And he couldn’t handle that. Not from James. Not when he could still taste chocolate and whiskey, lingering on his lips like a kiss.  
  
“Right,” he’d floundered, “okay, so…home. Me too. I mean. My home. I mean good night—” and fled.  
  
He’d not looked back. He’d known what he’d see: sleepy puzzlement, confusion, and possibly even hurt in those depthless eyes, amid the clinging pillows.  
  
He can picture it all with excruciating clarity. He would’ve gone back. He wants to, magically, impossibly, even at this moment.   
  
But it’d been the right choice. They’re friends now, amazingly, incredibly. They’re friends and he’s lucky enough to have that and he can’t jeopardize it by wanting more. It’s not as if James will want him in return. Not after what Michael did to him. Not with that old wound lurking insidiously in the ocean canyons, an uneven fault-line hidden by laughing waves.  
  
They’re friends. That’s enough.  
  
If he tells himself that over and over, he might even believe it.  
  
Cat laughs out loud, merriment bubbling over like champagne, and grabs James’s hands, squeezing them excitedly. James is grinning, too; Cat darts a glance in Michael’s direction, obviously spots him looking, and chirps something else which makes James blush, freckles washed in watercolor pink.  
  
They look happy. They look young and bright and animated and happy. His sister, and his best friend.  
  
James is a good man. James is a good _person_ , through and through. James deserves to have everything he’s ever wanted. Sunshine and glory and love and a life as sweet as one of the honey-drizzled slices of baklava he’d sent home with Michael the day before.  
  
A happy ending.  
  
Michael turns around, and walks determinedly in the direction of the closest source of alcohol, and proceeds to spend the next few hours getting deliberately, methodically, thoroughly smashed.  
  
He’s in the kitchen, looking for water—he’d thought water ought to be available there, which had in fact been a decent idea, except there’d been nothing cold in the fridge and he’d ended up staring at the tap and trying to work out the process of getting liquid from there to his mouth—when James finds him.  
  
“What’re you doing?”  
  
“Um…water?” There’s a reason he shouldn’t be talking to James. He wants to talk to James, though. He _always_ wants to talk to James.  
  
That’s probably the reason.  
  
“The reason for what? Also, here, I’ve got this, you can stop glowering at your sink like it’s personally offended you.”  
  
Apparently his brain’s forgotten the difference between internal and external commentary. Maybe if he pretends not to’ve heard, those blue eyes will cease being curious. “Thank you.” He accepts the bottle when James hands it to him, because that means he can put his hand over freckled fingers and pretend it’s an alcohol-related accident. “Thank you.”  
  
“Yes, you said.” James leans against the countertop next to him, settling in. “Any specific reason you’re in here exhaling expensive whiskey fumes, instead of out enjoying the party?”  
  
“You,” Michael says, and waves the water-bottle at him, which turns out to be a less than stellar idea, because it’s open. “Sorry!”  
  
“Oh, please, I’ve spilled worse on myself. And it’s not that expensive a shirt. What about me, then?”  
  
“ ’S a good shirt. Looks…good. On you.”  
  
“Ah…thank you? You know, we should probably get you to bed before your guests see this and figure out that you’re not all that intimidating. Can you handle stairs?”  
  
“Maybe?”  
  
“Okay, then, this way…”  
  
They make it two steps before Michael remembers why this is a terrible idea, why he shouldn’t be letting James walk him up to his room, shouldn’t be nuzzling James’s hair and cloudily wondering why the unruly waves smell like apples and sugar.  
  
“I use apple shampoo,” James says, “not exactly a momentous secret of the universe, you understand. Terrible?”  
  
“What? Oh. You.” He can blame his traitorous brain again for that one. No regard for his own secrets, or common discretion. Disloyal creature.  
  
“I’m…terrible?”  
  
“No!”  
  
“Then I’m confused.” James actually sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. This is entirely unfair. So Michael says so.  
  
“You’re not terrible. You’re the opposite of terrible. With the hair. And the water. Not fair.”  
  
“Okay…”  
  
“Stop laughing. You don’t understand.” He thinks about that for a minute. Realizes he’s out of water; the empty bottle gazes at him mournfully.   
  
He scowls at it. Doesn’t need the pity of a piece of plastic. “I should tell you. So that you can understand. It’s important.”  
  
“What’re we understanding, again? Do you want to sit down before we try the stairs?”  
  
“No. Just. You. You’re not terrible and now you’re all wet…from the water…and I can’t look at you all wet. I wanted to tell you.” His head’s going to hate him in the morning and the room’s wavering and he’s starting to be afraid he might be sick on the kitchen floor. But he has to get this out. Has to let James know. Even if that means leaving his own heart in pieces on said kitchen floor.  
  
He can live without a heart, with the emptied-out space in his chest, if that’s what it’ll take for James to be happy at last.  
  
He can. For James. And so he will.  
  
“All right…” The blue eyes look concerned. “Are you sure you don’t want to sit down? I can get you more water—”  
  
“No. Listen. You don’t have to do anything. You’ve never had to. For me. You don’t owe me anything and you shouldn’t.”  
  
“Michael,” James says, sounding unaccountably entertained, “it’s all right. Honestly. Come on, I can take you upstairs, you can lean on me.”  
  
“That’s what I mean!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I shouldn’t…I’m not…you shouldn’t be offering. For me to lean on you when you’re…offering to be leaned on. That’s not right.”  
  
“That’s…not?”  
  
“No. Because I want to lean on you.”  
  
“Then I’m not exactly seeing the problem.” James gets an arm around him. Michael panics, drunkenly.  
  
“No!”  
  
“You’d rather I leave you here like this? I won’t.”  
  
“No. You. You shouldn’t be holding me up. Not me. You should be holding her up. Not that she needs it.”  
  
“Ah…who, again?”  
  
“My sister,” Michael says, impatiently. “Catherine. You know.”  
  
“Your…sister?”  
  
“Only one I’ve got.”  
  
“Yes…I am aware…why are you…”  
  
“You should be with her.” As clear as he can make it. “You should be happy.” True. “Not with me, though. With her. Not me. If I didn’t say.”  
  
The arm falls away from his waist, as James takes a step back.  
  
“I don’t care,” Michael tries to explain. “I don’t have a problem with—I mean I do, I mean it’s going to kill me seeing you with her—because I—but I want you to be happy and you should be happy and so I can not care.” That’d made sense, right?  
  
James stares at him, face completely white beneath the freckles.   
  
“James?”  
  
Still nothing. No movement, either. That’s not right. James is always in motion, absentmindedly caressing a countertop or a spoon or a whisk, making expansive gestures in the air, casually reassuring the world that it’s loved.  
  
James is very motionless, right now. Poised as if he’s been flash-frozen. The summer-sea eyes are frozen, too, all the waves smothered under out-of-season ice.  
  
“James,” Michael attempts, “you don’t look…right.”  
  
“I don’t…” James swallows. Michael watches the motion of his throat. “Okay. I’m getting Catherine to take care of you, and then I’m…I don’t know. Just stay here for a minute, all right?”  
  
“James,” Michael says again, and then, wretchedly, “I think I’m going to—” and lunges toward the downstairs guest bathroom barely in time to find the toilet and throw up everything he’s ever consumed in his life.  
  
A hand stays on his back, brushes his hair out of his eyes, offers him water. He knows that hand. It’s got freckles and short happy fingertips and a small burn scar near the base of the thumb. It gets cold too rapidly.  
  
He should tell James again to go away, to leave him here to die in lonely misery. He can’t quite summon the words. Can’t give up that last small comfort, if it’s the final time.  
  
He can, however, throw up again, and weakly attempt to apologize.  
  
“Shut up,” James says, and holds him upright. “Please.”  
  
“I’m so sorry.”  
  
“For—for drinking all your family profits for the year? Or for doing this in the downstairs guest toilet? Yes, you probably should be. But that’s okay, I think you’re allowed, it’s your house…more water?”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“You did it for me.”  
  
“I didn’t. I mean—” That’s not right, either. James has breathed in, once, at the words. Gone extra quiet. Not a good sign.  
  
“I only meant—you weren’t—I’m very drunk. Horribly drunk. I—did I throw up on your feet?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“You aren’t wearing shoes.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it.”  
  
“You should have shoes,” Michael protests, because that’s somehow vital at this moment. “You had shoes. Earlier. You should have shoes. And…and cupcakes. And your bakery. And everything. Everything you want. Okay?”  
  
James makes a sound; he’s not looking in Michael’s direction, though Michael catches the movement as one hand swipes across blue eyes. “…okay.”  
  
“Okay?”  
  
“If that’ll get you to stop talking and let me take you upstairs, yes, okay. Water?”  
  
“No…you feel sad.” He bumps a shoulder clumsily into James’s arm. “Even your elbows feel sad. Why’re your elbows sad?”  
  
“My…elbows? I’ve never actually seen you this bad. Not even when we were teenagers and tried to drink that entire barrel of your father’s private reserve. Should I be worried?”  
  
“No. That’s what I was going to say, though…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You. You don’t get drunk. You just…sort of…”  
  
“I think you know that I do. Very recently, in fact. You were—you were there.”  
  
“No, I mean…you’re cute when you’re drunk, you have…big eyes, and you hug everything, all the…things, and you smile…you don’t throw up on people’s shoes. Or a toilet. You aren’t all…” He waves a hand, vaguely. James will figure out what he means. James always does.  
  
“You make me sound like a baby koala. Are you positive I can’t take you upstairs?”  
  
“Can’t stand up,” Michael points out, and then, “Kitten!”  
  
“ _…what?”_  
  
“You. Not a koala. Kitten. All cuddly and excited and adoptable. Is that a word? Adoptable.”  
  
“I…”  
  
“I would take you home,” Michael promises devoutly, because maybe that’ll get James to stop feeling sad beside him on the bathroom floor, “if you were a kitten, except not right now, because I think I’m going to pass out right now, I’m sorry.”  
  
Because he’s busy doing exactly that, he doesn’t get to hear James’s response. Only one last glimpse of enormous blue eyes, and an impression of water spilling over the shore.


	5. his accent sounded fine to me, to me…

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which happy endings, and possibly toast, occur.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, all! Much appreciated. :-)

He wakes up to coldness splashing against his face. It trickles cruel icicles down the back of his neck.   
  
“Michael,” says his sister’s voice, “you’re a moron.”  
  
The words bounce wildly around inside his skull. He groans. Buries his face in the pillows.  
  
Pillows? When did he end up in bed? In _whose_ bed?  
  
He cracks his eyes open. Okay. His own pillows. His own sheets. Unfortunately, at the moment, also his own head.  
  
Cat dumps more freezing water on him.   
  
“Stop that. ’m awake. _Why_ am I awake?”  
  
“James!”  
  
“What?” He sits up. Regrets it. Then again, he regrets a lot at the moment, starting with the decision to drink all the whiskey in the universe the previous night. He’s pretty sure there’re other aspects of the night he should also be regretting, if he could get them to come to mind through the alcohol-drenched haze.  
  
One memory does swim up, painfully well-defined: James wide-eyed and chillingly motionless, an arm slipping away from Michael’s side.  
  
But he’d been trying to do the right thing. He’d told James to go be with Catherine. To be happy without him. Hadn’t he?  
  
“…James?”  
  
“You idiot,” Cat shrieks, “you don’t even _remember?”_ The windows quiver, in fear for their glass-paned lives.  
  
“Ow…I thought…I said…what _about_ James?”  
  
“You deserve the ow. You deserve—I don’t even know what you deserve. Did you tell him you didn’t want him? That he should be with someone else—with me, of all people? Michael, you arrogant ass.”  
  
“That I didn’t—wait, what?” Too hungover for this. Far, far too hungover. The kind of hangover he’s not had in fucking _years_. He squeezes his scratchy eyes shut for a second. Hopes the room’ll stop wobbling of its own volition. “How do you even know what I—you weren’t _there_.”  
  
“You were talking in your sleep. When I came up to check on you. Mumbling, more like. About how this is the best thing to do and he shouldn’t want to be with you. You said that to him. Didn’t you.”   
  
“I didn’t mean—he should be happy. I thought I told him to be happy.”  
  
“You—” Cat makes an indescribable noise of exasperation. “Michael, he’s in love with you. He always has been.”  
  
The words can’t be true. He sits very still amid the sheets, patiently waiting for them to make sense.   
  
“Even after the way you treated him,” she says, “that night, the night you insulted him in front of everyone and gave him money and told him to leave—we were talking when you came back out, you know. Only talking. Like we were tonight, when he looked at you and he looked so happy and I had to tease him about it—He needed someone to talk to, back then. Or at least someone who’d talk to him. All he ever said about it was that it wouldn’t hurt so much if you weren’t the same person who’d held him the last time he’d cried.”  
  
The bottom’s slowly dropping out of his nauseated stomach. Out of the world. Each new revelation hurls a knife into his chest. “But—he didn’t—he never said—”  
  
Of course not. James wouldn’t. Certainly not after Michael’d treated him like a prostitute.  
  
“He carried you to bed,” Catherine hisses. “He came out to get me, and he’d already taken you upstairs after you passed out next to our downstairs toilet—and he cleaned you up first, by the way, he’s a better friend than I would’ve been—and he said I should check on you. Bring you water. And his eyes were so _unhappy_ —Michael, you’re an awful person. I never thought I’d say this to you. But you are.”  
  
“I didn’t know…” No excuse. The remnants of last night’s whiskey churn in his gut. No defense against the knives, which just dig deeper. “I swear. I didn’t know he was—but he can’t be. Not after I—”  
  
“He shouldn’t be. But he is. He loves you, and you fucking broke his heart. Again.”  
  
“You don’t say fuck…since when do you say fuck…” Just making sounds. Trying to process.  
  
“I’m doing my best,” Cat says levelly, “not to punch you in the face. I’m a doctor. I know how to make it hurt.”  
  
It already hurts. More accurately, it doesn’t hurt, not yet. The blank fateful moment between the gunshot and the impact. “I never thought,” he tries again. “I knew I felt—how I feel—I love him. I’m in love with him.”  
  
Those words’re true, too. He knows that the instant they leave his lips. He’s in love with James, with everything about James. And he’s ruined everything, every single time, everything he’s ever done _to_ James.  
  
“You are not,” Cat declares. And then stares at his face. And then stares some more. “…oh, my god.”  
  
Michael falls back onto the bed. Covers his face with the closest pillow. It’s not very sympathetic.   
  
The remembered shape of James’s hand, resting comfortingly on his back, burns. An accusation. A scar.  
  
“Oh, Michael,” his sister sighs, and sits down next to him. “You’re still an ass. An oblivious ass. But I’m sorry.”  
  
The hurt’s not fully registered even yet. The bullet’s too quick and clean, slicing through tender muscle and bone and heart.  
  
And then, belatedly, something _else_ registers. He flings away the pillow. Lurches upright. “Cat. What _about_ James? Why were you—”  
  
“Oh, right, you’re going to care about where he is _now_ —”  
  
“I do care! What—wait, what do you mean, where he is? Where is he?”  
  
Cat looks down. Scuffles her feet in the rug. “No one knows.”  
  
 _“What?”_  
  
“Look…he’s probably just busy, or equally hung over, or something…”  
  
“Tell me!”  
  
“I tried his mobile, this morning, I wanted to see how he was…he didn’t pick up, so I figured it was a busy morning…”  
  
“It’s Sunday. Cinnamon roll day.”  
  
“Okay…okay, of course you know that…so I called the bakery, and the skinny one with the cheekbones and the pretty eyes answered—”  
  
“Benedict?”  
  
“Maybe? Anyway, he answered the phone by asking me if I was James. Well. More like panicking. He hasn’t seen James since yesterday afternoon. And something about pecans and brown sugar stuck to the ceiling.”  
  
“James,” Michael repeats, blankly, as if the name’s a magic spell, going to conjure up wounded-ocean eyes and mischievous hair on the spot.  
  
Doesn’t work. Of course not.  
  
“Phone,” he says.   
  
“I don’t know where yours—”  
  
“Yours, then!” James might not answer if Michael calls, anyway. Might pick up for Cat. She’s his friend.  
  
Or not. The voicemail greets his ear, a mocking recorded simulacrum of that incomparable voice. Maybe James doesn’t want to talk to anyone with the Fassbender last name right now.  
  
No one answers at the bakery. Or at James’s grandmother’s house. Or James’s sister’s tour bus.  
  
“I’m going down there.”  
  
“Michael, you—”  
  
“ _He’s fucking missing_ , Cat!” Since last night. Since James had tucked Michael into bed, and told Cat to check on him in the morning, and left. With unhappy eyes.  
  
Catherine looks up at him, from the side of the bed. Her expression’s troubled. The whole world is grey, rainclouds thundering in outside, the first drops heralding the storm.   
  
“…he’s missing,” Michael says again, and then puts a hand over his mouth, horrified. What if James _is_ missing? Never made it home? Has become one of those innumerable city statistics, lost in the night and the rain?  
  
James gets cold in the night and the rain. James gets cold so easily.   
  
“I have to,” he says, “I have to find him. I have to…I just. I have to.”  
  
“I know.” Cat stands up. Looks him up and down. “I don’t know what you’re going to say when you do.”  
  
“I don’t either.”  
  
“You should probably shower.”  
  
“I don’t have time to—”  
  
“You think he’s going to appreciate you finding him while you’re dressed in last night’s clothes and smelling like that? I’ll keep calling. I’ll borrow Mum’s phone. And look for yours, while I’m at it.”  
  
Michael stares at himself helplessly in the mirror. He does look awful. Red eyes, hair everywhere, morning stubble. “…fine. Thank you. And…thank you.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“Um. For saying when, just now.”  
  
“Michael…” she starts, and he shakes his head because he can’t, and then takes the fastest shower he ever has in his life and throws on the first clothes he can find and grabs his mobile from her outstretched hand and bolts out the door.  
  
  
James isn’t in the bakery. Benedict, however, is. He’s cowering on the floor behind the stand mixers when Michael charges through the doors.  
  
“Where’s James?”  
  
“James…”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“He’s not here. He’s not—he left—he’s…” Benedict appears to be hyperventilating. Michael leans over, puts on what he hopes is a reassuring expression, watches Benedict’s eyes grow rounder, and stops trying for reassuring.  
  
“Just tell me. Please.”  
  
“He’s gone. He—he came in, he looked around, he went in the back for a few minutes—” The boy’s practically sobbing. “He said he’d called that person—you know, from the Food—”  
  
“The Food Network. In…New York.”  
  
“Right, he said he’d called him back and taken the offer and he was going and he was leaving me this, this place, he said I could have it if I wanted it because he wouldn’t be here—”  
  
“When?”  
  
“This morning—maybe an hour ago—I can’t run this place, I don’t know how to do what he does, I can’t—”  
  
“You’ll be fine,” Michael says, mouth on autopilot. It’s what James would say. He’s mentally calculating times. If James had only taken the job an hour ago, he couldn’t’ve packed beforehand—unless he’d been planning to leave regardless…  
  
“Maybe someday, but not now!” Benedict rubs a hand across his face. “That’s not—I asked him not to go and he said he needed to and that I’d be all right and he’d call me from New York—but—but he looked at me like—I’ve never seen him like that, it was scary—”  
  
“Like what?” Michael wants to shake the boy, but restrains himself. Barely. “What did he tell you?”  
  
“I said…that was pretty much it…he said he’d call me when he got there and he smiled but James doesn’t smile like that and if he was on the phone he wasn’t on the phone very long and when he said he’d call he looked at me like—” Benedict swallows. Meets Michael’s eyes, unhappily. “Like he didn’t think he would.”  
  
All the air leaves his body in a rush. He’s dimly aware of collapsing back against the wall, onto the floor.  
  
James wouldn’t do that. Not that. James is too sensible to—to—to do what Benedict _can’t_ be suggesting.  
  
Sometimes I don’t like myself very much, James says in Michael’s memory, wry, self-mocking. Shrugs.  
  
He lunges to his feet, leaving Benedict on the floor, and sprints for his bike, and prays to every deity in the whole fucking universe as he does.  
  
  
The door to James’s flat is thoroughly locked. Michael hammers on it with fists and desperation.  
  
Footsteps. He’s hearing footsteps on the other side. And that spiced-molasses voice shouts, “Hang on, coming!” and Michael all but collapses from relief on the spot.  
  
He can’t be relieved yet. He doesn’t know what James was doing on the other side of the door.  
  
Said door’s yanked abruptly open. And he’s face to face with James.  
  
Who stares at him. Blinks. Twice. “…Michael?”  
  
“Oh thank god,” Michael says, helplessly.  
  
“Okay…Michael. Really?” Incredulous. The expression of a person trying to convince himself to accept a vision he _knows_ can’t be true. “You…why are you…did you need…something? Sorry, the place is kind of a mess…I’m moving out, actually, that’s why—do you want to come in? Sorry.”  
  
“Um,” Michael says, intelligently, and trails after him through the doorway, into the kitchen, where James looks around a bit frantically and then hands him a broken piece of shortbread. “Here, eat this.”  
  
“Um…”  
  
“I don’t know, it’s a reflex, or something. And you look like you could use it. Sit down.” Hands nudge him into a chair. Michael goes, because he’s too busy thinking _thank you, thank you, thank god_ and, equally, _moving out…?_  
  
Moving where?  
  
“You’ll probably want milk with that, it’s a day old…we should finish off that milk anyway, not as if anyone’s going to be here to drink it…”  
  
Michael, who’s just instinctively taken a bite of the shortbread—buttery, cakey, delicious—suddenly finds that he can’t swallow. James. Thinking about not being here.  
  
James stops. Seems to really take in Michael’s haggard appearance for the first time. “You stopped by the bakery, didn’t you? What Benedict-version of the truth did you actually hear?”   
  
“He…told me…he said he _thought_ you called the Food Network, that you were…going to New York?”  
  
Those hands pause, closing the refrigerator door. The pale traceries of burn scars, along the closest arm, are very visible in the overhead light. “I did. And I am. If he said anything else—if that’s why you’re here—honestly, you don’t need to worry. Benedict’s ridiculously melodramatic, and I’m not going to kill myself here in my own flat because you don’t want me. That would be…also ridiculous. And kind of stupid. And I like to think I’m not stupid. Understand?”  
  
It’s the way James says the words. So casually. As if they’re not unspeakable. As if he’s not considering the act now, but now’s not the same as never. Not out of the realm of the possible.  
  
“James,” Michael whispers. “Please don’t go.”  
  
James settles a hip against the countertop. Curls fingers around the smooth edge, comforting the universe, as always. “What reason would I have to stay?”  
  
“Because,” Michael says, and hopes to hell they’re still talking about New York, only talking about New York, “this isn’t me not wanting you.”  
  
“You do remember that I was also there. Or were you just _that_ unbelievably drunk at the time?”  
  
“I—well. Yes. I was. But not because I didn’t want you. Because I do want you. Because I love you, I’ve been in love with you for years, I think ever since you walked out of my office and ten seconds later I knew I needed you to walk back in, and you look at even the fucking raindrops like they’re something extraordinary and _you’re_ extraordinary and you’re going to be famous and you deserve it, all of it, you deserve everyone loving you, and I—if you wanted to be with Catherine, if you want—anything you want—I couldn’t, I can’t, stand in your way.” He looks at the floor, because he can’t face those ocean-current eyes.   
  
There’s a dropped crumb of shortbread near his foot. Probably from his own clumsiness, earlier. It tells him silently that he just keeps making more of a mess of James’s life, as if he needs the point driven home by spilled pastry.  
  
“I want you to be happy,” he says, because that’s all he has left. “Please be happy.”  
  
James doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Michael feels the world tremble, ready to come apart, in the emptiness.  
  
“You do know I don’t want to be with your sister. I mean, I love your sister, she’s my friend, but…she _is_ my friend.” That voice is carefully neutral. Establishing facts. “That’s all, right?”  
  
Michael nods. Without looking up, he can’t see the gestures, the small movements, but he can imagine: the tip of that head to the side, curious and rueful; the pensive little lip-lick that’s James contemplating a decision; the hair falling into one eye, when James asks, “So…she told you you were being a idiot, then?”  
  
“In…much less polite words…yes. James?”  
  
“Michael?”  
  
“I’m sorry. About everything. I mean—everything. I’d take it all back. If I could. Everything I ever did, to hurt you.”  
  
“I’m not—”  
  
“You are. You’re hurt. And I’m sorry.”  
  
There’s another pause.  
  
“Well,” James says, and suddenly that voice is a lot closer, right in front of him, and Michael looks up impulsively and their eyes meet, “you could…not take everything back. Maybe. You said—you did say you love me. I heard you.”  
  
“I do.” He can’t look away. There’s something different in James’s face, now, something almost like elation hovering at the curve of those lips, the corners of blue eyes. And Michael’s caught in the undertow, tugged out to sea by the pull of those waves, waiting for them to burst and crash over his head.  
  
James holds out both hands. Slowly, feeling like he’s dreaming, Michael lifts his own and sets them in the offered ones, fingers settling over old kitchen-injuries and scars and broad palms. And those fingers curl around his, holding them in place.  
  
“Did she also tell you,” James murmurs, “how I feel about you? Or do I get to tell you that?”  
  
“She…said that you…I didn’t believe it, why would you, you wouldn’t want—”  
  
“Michael,” James sighs, all affectionate impatience, “it’s _always_ been you I want,” and then yanks on their joined hands and Michael finds himself on his feet with James’s arms going around him for stability.  
  
“But,” he starts, not protesting, only bewildered, and James laughs and shakes his head and says, “You’re still trying to do the right thing, you’ve always been trying to do the right thing, you’re here because even when you didn’t think I could love you you still wanted to see me happy—”  
  
“I always want to see you happy!”  
  
“—and you still wonder why I’d be in love with you? I am. And I do. Love you.” James looks up at him, safe in the circle of Michael’s own arms, which’ve closed around that compact shape as if they’ll never let go, and that’s not merely a hint of elation in that gaze now. It’s everywhere. In the air, in the imminent crash and tumble of the rain, in the taste of shortbread and sugar lingering on his tongue.  
  
“I’d really like to kiss you,” Michael tells him, earnestly. And James says, “I would very much like you to kiss me, so yes, absolutely yes, please kiss me now.”  
  
So Michael does.  
  
James kisses him back. James kisses like sunrise, like apple tarts and cream, like certainty, like the first-ever rainbow after a tumultuous storm, saturated and overflowing with limitless color.  
  
“I love you,” Michael has to say again, into the kiss, and James laughs and runs his tongue along Michael’s lower lip, teasing, testing, tasting. When Michael kisses him harder, claiming all that laughter, plundering it with lips and teeth and tongue, he makes a small sound, a tiny gasp of affirmation and breathlessness and desire, and Michael instantly knows it’s his own mission in life to earn that sound as many times as humanly possible. If not more.  
  
James fits so neatly into his arms. Sturdy and solid and short, mouth at just the right angle, weight of him exactly right too, all those muscles cradled snugly against Michael’s height. Even through clothing, that feeling’s electric.  
  
James shivers slightly. Possibly feeling all that too. Michael hopes so—god, he hopes so—but when he nibbles at those enticing lips again, he tastes something different. Salt, and water, even as James opens his mouth and invites further exploration.  
  
Tears. James is crying.  
  
“What is it?” He pulls back, touches one cheek with the barest fingertip, feels the wetness there. “Are you…did I…what did I do that you don’t want? Can you tell me?”  
  
But James is already shaking his head, sending teardrops flying like cut crystal, scattered to the stormy afternoon. “No, it’s not—I’m happy, I swear I’m happy, I only—you’re here. Ten minutes ago I thought I was—I thought I would be—and then you were here and you’re saying you love me—”  
  
“I do love you.” He rubs a thumb over the tear-tracks, blurring the crooked lines, wanting to erase them all.  
  
“I know,” James says, “I know, I just—I can’t. I want to, and I can’t because if it’s not—” That luscious voice fractures, foundations cracking, old scars opening up jagged and new.  
  
“It _is_ ,” Michael says, and pulls him in closer. “It is, it is real, I love you, and you love me, which I don’t understand, but I’ll take it because I’m selfish and desperate and in love and I want you, all of you, and—should I offer you a cookie, this time?”  
  
And James laughs, submerged and watery but true, brightness like the glint of copper coins and sunlight in fountains. Wishes, and promises, and hope.  
  
“I love hearing you laugh,” Michael tells him, truthfully, and gets a smile in reply, wordless and startling and radiant.  
  
He glances around at the hurricane of disordered belongings, half-packed bags. Grabs James’s hands, and tugs, purposefully. James blinks, but goes along willingly, though he does appear a bit surprised when they end up beside the bed. “Ah…”  
  
“Not for that. Well—maybe for that later. Though I should warn you it might not last very long, if you’re going to lick your lips at me.”  
  
“…like this?”  
  
“Not the same as what you just did, but even more yes. But, James…” He kicks off his shoes, sits down on the pillow-strewn mattress, draws James down into his arms. “Right now I’d just like to hold you.”  
  
“Oh,” James says, “yes,” and curls naturally up against him, inside his embrace, as if they’ve done this a million times, a perfect fit, and yet every motion, every breath, is all brand-new.  
  
They lie there entwined, breathing in unison, legs tangled together, while the rain ventures out to play tranquil rhythms on rooftops and windowpanes, steady and constant and serene.  
  
Moment by moment, the apprehension goes away. Eases out of each tense muscle, gradually, and fades into acceptance, allowed bit by bit to be true. More so each time Michael kisses him, light and tender and marveling, lips wandering over the arch of an eyebrow, the line of his jaw. The corner of those lips, so ready to smile.  
  
James murmurs, after that one, “I love you,” soft and wondering. The words pour themselves into Michael’s heart, and remain there, piercingly sweet.  
  
“I love you,” he whispers back, and James smiles into the next kiss, and relaxes that final inch, and lets himself be held.  
  
After a while, their heartbeats align. Not in unison, but in complement, filling up the gaps of each other’s spaces-between.  
  
James falls asleep, despite visibly fighting not to, somewhere along the way. Michael, who can’t—too exhausted and exhilarated, too tired and triumphant—stays awake with the rain, watching him sleep, listening to quiet inhales and exhales, drying tear-marks and simple trust, that fluffy-haired head pillowed on Michael’s chest.  
  
After a while James must get warm, because he sighs in his sleep and shifts away; Michael wants to reach for him, but is afraid to wake him. It’s been a long and complicated few weeks, for James especially.   
  
It’s been a long few years. For them both.  
  
Besides, he’s a little on edge, needing motion, action, something to _do_. All the fatigue and excitement’s burrowed into his bones. Outside, the rain’s still pattering away.  
  
He glances around. Spots the notepad beside the bed, the top sheet scribbled over with arcane and mysterious messages about Irish-cream-to-caramel ratios; one of James’s side notes admonishes _Remember not to be drunk already the next time you test this one!!_ and Michael has to put a hand over his mouth to hold back the laugh, and then to hold in the tears. So damn wonderful, always.  
  
In the bed, James sighs again, and moves a restive leg, and turns his head in Michael’s direction, and then quiets, as if that reorientation’s all he needs.  
  
Michael picks up the notepad. Can’t help skimming his fingers over the words, the writing, where freckled fingertips would’ve held a pen and pressed ink to paper.  
  
He looks back at James, smiles, and leaves his own note on the pillow where tropical-ocean eyes will spot it the instant James wakes up, and then heads out—quietly—to find the kitchen.  
  
Not quite fifteen minutes later, he’s losing a grudge match with James’s toaster, which is sitting there looking smug despite Michael’s willingness to invoke all _kinds_ of profanity, when he hears a sock-muffled footfall and spins around in time to see James wander into the kitchen, sleep-rumpled and messy-haired and yawning. “I’m not certain my toaster can technically be a bastard, it doesn’t have parents as such…”  
  
“It’s determined to learn how,” Michael says, “it’s been practicing. I thought you were asleep, what’re you doing up, I was trying to surprise you.”  
  
“I found your note.” James holds it up, yawns again, runs a hand through his hair; meanders over to Michael’s side and fits himself into the corner where two countertops meet, smiling. “Thank you.”  
  
“For what?” _I’m still here_ , it says. _I’m_ _in your kitchen. I’ll be here when you wake up. I love you_.  
  
He’d underlined that last one.  
  
“For…the being here. I love you, too.” They both pause to listen to those words, for a second.   
  
“I’m not going to New York,” James says, after, looking up into Michael’s eyes. “If they still want me to do the show, that’s fine—exciting, actually, I think it’d be sort of fun—but we’re filming it here. Not negotiable.”  
  
“You’re not—”  
  
“I’m not going _anywhere_. I promise.”   
  
The rain cheers unsubtly, overhead. Michael looks back, directly into those so-blue eyes. Breathes out.  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“Oh,” James says, head tipped to one side, smile open and unguarded now, all the fortress gates swung wide for good and left to erode and wear away, through the persistence of time and elements and Michael’s sheer determination, “I know. What’re you doing?”  
  
“Well…you had bread…I was trying to make—for you—but. Um. I still burn toast.” He focuses forlornly on the topmost slice of charred bread. “I’m sorry. I swear I do know how to cook. I’m great with lamb. Or beef Wellington. Pretty much anything with meat. I can handle meat.”  
  
“Oh, the comments that could be made…” James picks up that topmost piece. Studies the scorch marks thoughtfully.   
  
“Don’t eat that. Please. I’m so sorry.”  
  
“I’m not.” James puts the toast back on the plate. “And you don’t have to be. Sorry, I mean. You made toast. For me.”  
  
“I…failed to make toast for you, I think.”  
  
“I’ve got extra bread,” James says, and slips his arm around Michael’s waist, head coming to rest on Michael’s shoulder, casual and loving and inarguably real. “We can make more.”


End file.
